Be Careful What You Wish For!

07/29/09
Wednesday



We all have been talking and wishing for good old Maine summer weather......We used to call it "The Dog Days Of Summer" When the sun would beat down in an unrelentless
manner, hot and humid with nary a breeze....Oh it was perfect swimming weather. We complained about it when it arrived yet yearned and dreampt of it when adding those extra layers in the sub zero temps of winter.

Lately.....well for the last month or so we have had day after day of rain and very few bright sunny days. Everyone has been talking about the good ole times with endless days of bubbling warm rays of sunshine.

Well, today we got our wish. So much so that there was at least three H's in humid making the 88 degree reading on my thermometer seem wrong....surely it was at least a hundred. I knew it would be a tough run today, yet I was so looking forward to it. I was undecided.......duplicate the track workout I missed last night or an ass kicking tempo run in the woods?

Finally I decided that if the humidity was going to make me miserable, at least I could find a way to enjoy it. Now, I do enjoy track workouts (especially if it is raining) but in the humidity something about having to do math also just felt like too much work.....calculating and checking splits, stopping and starting.....no I think a step up tempo style trail run seems much more fun. Besides, if it does start thunder and lightning, I think I would rather be in the woods.

I went to Bradbury (east side) and hit the trails with vengence. I didn't do a warmup.... Hey I was already sweating while putting on the running shoes! I realized immediately I had made the right choice, besides the slight distraction of a few bikers, I couldn't have had a better run.

I felt strong and fast, I negotiated the corners with a calculating precision and occasionally switched from Bipod to Tripod as I used a tree to slingshot my body to the right direction.

I couldn't have been wetter if it was pouring out. The humidity raised it's ugly head and my body laughed.....laughed at the sweat, snickered at the shortness of breath, cut through the thick air as if I were a huge knife that had been sharpened that very morning.

There were bikers behind me but they couldn't catch me as I created air over rocks and stumps, while dodging the gooey center of semidryed up mudpits. I was suprised how much standing water and puddles have dissapeared since my run here last Saturday.
Left behind were the mudpits from hell as it seemed their only function was to steal my traction and attempt to force me off the trail.

I rounded one corner and heard the yell of a biker...."Runner!" He pulled to the side of the trail as I easily skipped around him while saying thanks. The riders behind him scattered off the trail as if he had yelled Bear or Moose! I felt honered that they acknowleged my determination not to fall as the down hill gravitational pull would not allow me to stop gracefully.

As the sweat poured out of my body, I found my mind wandering to a vision of ice covered trees and cars ..... how cool would that feel at the end of this run? Completely covered in ice and calming down the hot sizzle imbedded in my skin. That is when the thought came to me....."careful what you wish for" surely I was not going to wish for winter....not right now anyway. I resigned to the knowledge that the 75 degree water of my pool would more than satisfy my baking bones.

It was a great run and surely it was no where near as fast as it felt....but it sure felt fast! Of course as usual the Garmen regestered many strait lines proving that it missed oh so many turns of the trail, thus making it hard to calculate my true mile pace. I did however have the Nano on (which always reads a bit long because of the shorter strides in the trail) Between the two I think I have a fairly accurate protrayal of my run.

6+- miles ..55:44 (9:20 pace?)
splits:
10:51...144-154
9:23...147-159
10:57...139-156
11:32...145-169
9:30...151-161
8:28...153-169(8:09 kick)
Not sure about these splits, I felt faster in miles 1 and 3 than I did in mile 2.