Posts Tagged ‘sunburn’

It was a roasting hot day for the Tour de Yorkshire so I was worried about sunburn. Of course, being a computer programmer and being from Yorkshire, I’m worried about sunburn pretty much all of the time.

I started with some factor 50 and then re-applied a special factor 30 “sport” edition at each feed station. The sport edition is more resistant to sweat than normal suncream. It feels more like you’re spreading an ointment than some cream.

For the most part, it worked. The only problem was there was a slight gap between where my suncream came up to and where my cycling shorts came down to.

I’m not sure if I didn’t cream high enough or whether my shorts rode up a little bit during the ride. But, either way, I’ve got these little strips of sunburn that have been hanging around on my legs all week.

Still, at least it was nowhere near as bad as Iceland.

Do you see that slight reddening on my nose and cheeks? That’s sunburn. November sunburn.

Admittedly, it’s very slight. But I still think it’s impressive that I managed to get sunburnt in November. Though, I am the person who was off work with acute sunburn after returning from Iceland.

It’s thanks to the Abbey Dash being both freezing and sunny.

In my post about the weather I shared this photo of my sunburn:

It looks worse in the photo than it actually was. It was noticeably red, but it wasn’t that burnt. It was a little sore but some after sun that we found at 1011 (an Icelandic supermarket chain) did the trick. You have to give the store credit: they really do have “everything you need and more…”.

This happened on Monday, and it started looking better the next day and continued to improve the day after. By this point, we’re on Wednesday and heading home. Then, on the Wednesday afternoon, it started itching.

Oh my did it itch!

It was horrendous. It wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep because I was involuntarily twitching every twenty seconds. Every hour, on the hour I would go to bed and spend 15 minutes twitching, before getting up, watching some TV and repeating the cycle.

Somewhere between 3-4am I gave up on making it into work the next day and sent a message in to say I would not be in. At 6am I finally managed to drift off: only to be woken up by Elina’s alarm at 6:10am. I spent some more time trying to sleep, then set off for Boots to clean them out of itch cream.

Nothing worked. I tried after sun, anti-itch cream, even antihistamines. But none of it provided relief.

Luckily, by this point, it was starting to subside. The itching continued for several days, but it didn’t stop me going to work on Friday, nor sleeping on the Friday night.

When I looked it up on the internet (which was a mistake) they talked about “hell’s itch” or “hell itch”, with people telling stories about it causing sleep deprivation, depression and torture. I don’t think what I went though is was as bad as being tortured, but I can see why people would make big claims about it. It was not a pleasant experience.