The past few weeks, Thursday has been my interval day. However, I did intervals on Tuesday, and I thought today might be a good day to do hills, which I've neglected for a couple weeks. The normal 'hill' loop I do, which is only 3.4 miles, would be intense enough to be worthwhile, but not so intense that it should impact my ability to do the 15 miles that is coming up this weekend.
This time I did something a little different, though. Normally, when I do this hill loop I only end up with about 0.2 miles of warmup before the hill. Today I did about 0.4 miles extra in the beginning, to get things warmed up. Also - today was rather warm, and so it occured to me that I need to get myself prepared for my times to start backing off. With the extra heat and humidity to make the air less dense, and the extra effort required by the body for cooling, that all combines to make running more difficult and intense.
While running in the summer is not fun because of these factors, I'm trying a different perspective on it. I figure that if I can continue to work hard during the time of year when running is most laborious, that'll just make running in the fall that much more efficient. My theory is that it is kind of like doing intervals, where you are pushing back the boundaries of what your body can handle in terms of energy available for the exercise, but without the same type of intensity. My idea may be full of crap - but either way, I know enough from experience that I can expect my performance to seemingly suffer during the hot weather. It's just my hope that come fall when the weather starts to cool off again, I'll have a performance bounce that will be nice to see.
Total Distance: 3.8 miles
Total Time: 32:54 (28:56 for the 3.4 mile loop, for comparison purposes)
Avg HR: 159 (163 for the 3.4 mile loop)
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