Today I was the Bug – RunLog 9-2-14

You know the old saying or song, that sometime you are the bug and sometime you are the windshield.

Today the humidity was the windshield and I definitely was the bug.

Tuesday’s are my hardest speedwork days and this morning was somewhere near 80-100% humidity earlier.

That high humidity was going to make things pretty tough, especially when I did a longer run yesterday in some pretty bad heat/humidity too. Looking back, that run took more out of me than I thought it would, even though I took it easy.

Today, I woke up tired and not very motivated, which was VERY unusual, because I do like my Tuesday speedwork sessions and look forward to getting out there and pushing myself harder than usual.

Let’s put it this way, Bennie was not even thrilled about running in this stuff, he was either beside me or behind me almost all the run and didn’t bother to try and pull on the leash to get me to go faster.

The part that got me the most about the humidity wasn’t that my shirt was soaked after the first mile (I usually do not sweat easily), but that my glasses kept fogging up and became an obstacle to running safely, much less running fast.

At miles 1.4 and 1.8, we had to share the road with a dump truck and Bennie wanted to go in the other direction than we were going 😉 .

Finally, trying to see out of my glasses got so bad and I had that “not feeling like running feeling” that when I got to 2.0 miles, I just gave up and stopped, not being able to see the rocks clearly was getting to be a little of a safety issue. Hell Bennie didn’t even complain when we stopped and just walked it home from there.

Treadmill

With this kind of humidity, there was no way, I was going to get any kind of quality if I went to the track, so I decided to go for the Air Conditioning and treadmill routine. I made a deal with myself and said if I still didn’t have it after that, I could shut it down and walk away, knowing that I had given it a good effort.

My workout ended up like this:

1.0 mile @ 7.2 mph — warm-up
.25 @ 8.7 mph
.25 @ 7.2 mph
.25 @ 8.7 mph
.25 @ 7.2 mph
.25 @ 8.7 mph
.25 @ 7.2 mph
.25 @ 8.7 mph
.13 @ 6.2 mph
.12 @ 9.2 mph
.50 @ 6.1 mph
.25 @ 6.6 mph
.25 @ 7.2 mph

Even though I ran in an air-conditioned gym, I still looked like I had gone swimming when I got done.

I did my 4 fast quarters and just didn’t have anything in the tank and although I added in a quick 200 before I started my cool-down mile.

I was done at that point.

I was happy that I was able to do the 4 quarters at the pace I did, but also glad when I finished that last one – sometimes you just have to be smart and know when not to push any further. I reached that point today and while I probably could have kept going, I feel very comfortable with stopping where I did.

I haven’t been to Champions, since they started fixing/painting it. Wow – what a difference it has made. Everything just looks so much better, it doesn’t have that dark, dingy feel that it did. I really like what they are doing and it looks great.

One thing that I did a differently is that I swapped out my LockLaces for regular laces on my GoMeb2’s and they felt a lot more comfortable after I did that. Which surprised me, but I have found that sometimes LockLaces work great with some shoes and not so great with others, especially (for me at least) those shoes who do not have a padded tongue, which the GoMeb2’s do not have.

I got my runs in and that is about all I can say today :-).