how long can I pretend that the seasons are not reversed?

It was really windy and stormy here today. Wind in Geelong has a category of its own. There are literally days when the gusts blow you over. Today was one of those days. I mostly stayed inside and baked bread and made pumpkin soup. My body is apparently still convinced that we are heading into winter, not summer, and so recently I have had strange cravings for squash. Hopefully the soup can ward them off for a while.

When I picked up the area official tourism map a couple of weeks ago, one of the events was a marathon along the great ocean road, supposedly one of the most beautiful coastal drives in the world. The idea started to form in my head that I should train for the marathon. It's in May, so it gives me a long time to train, and there's a half marathon race as well if I don't feel up to running a whole marathon by then. I've been perusing training schedules and, unfortuantely, they all seem to only start about 16-20 weeks out. I have much less confidence in my ability to suddenly run 20-odd miles and would prefer to build up to that distance much more slowly. So, I've been running three miles a day pretty consistently for the past couple of weeks and decided to officially start my training with a long run this morning. It was only six miles, a distance I used to run routinely in Ecuador, but it felt like a really long way. The constant threat of magpie attacks doesn't help, either. Although I have yet to be attacked while running. I'm building a theory that they only attack walkers, and that they seem to target people with curly hair (a curly-haired Macedonian friend of mine here is the only other person I know to routinely be targeted). But I digress. I decided to brave the wind since skipping my first day of training wouldn't exactly set a good precedent. But the wind was surprisingly strong. At one point an unexpected gust actually knocked me over. Fortunately, I made it back home and spent the rest of the day cooking, eating, and watching Australian television so as to completely negate any positive health value the run might have had.