The weather forecast for up heah in Maine this weekend is pretty toasty, Saturday is usually my longer run day and since it appears that it will be outside of my safe for me to run zone pretty quickly, I jumped at the opportunity for the wife to chase me down in Clifford as I ran towards Waterville with an hour head start.

Yeah, running at high noon is not usually a great idea during July and there is a reason that I don’t run longer distances at that time of day. However, the humidity levels were reasonable and the temp in the shade was in the mid 70’s.

So I headed out the door, but as I was leaving the wife kind of told me that I only had 45 minutes to get my run done. Shit, that meant only about 5.0 miles in this kind of weather and that I would have to scurry a little bit if I wanted get back out on the Middle Road for her to easily find my sorry arse on the side of the road.

Which meant I had to go a little quicker than I had planned in this heat – it was great motivation to get heat-adapted in a hurry. 😉

All the splits were under 9:00 and I searched out shade whenever I could find it. Unfortunately from mile 4.0 on there was not a lot a shade on this course. I had to contend with the full sun from there on out.

Once I got on the Middle Road, it got pretty warmish and down on the Town Farm Road, well I won’t say it was an oven, but the old hat was raining pretty good by the time I got Lee Marcoux’s Butcher Shop.

I crossed over the Interstate 95 bridge wondering where Mary was.

I had passed the 6.0 mile point and was almost to 7.0 miles and it seemed like that 45 minute head start was going to turn into an hour. It seems that she went back to the original plan and left the house an hour after I started.

Which didn’t really matter, by the time I got to 7.0 miles I was ready to stop, the heat was working its magic against my pea brain and the body was telling me that it was time to shut it down. I managed to suffer for an additional .25 before I decided enough was enough and shut it down.

I walked to the end of 10 Rod Road and turned around when I saw Clifford coming down the dirt road to pick me up. A .6 mile walk on top of the 7 plus of running was a pretty good distance in those conditions. Not horrible conditions, but still pretty warmish, even with the breeze out of the North, which did help.

On a cooler day, I probably would have gotten in 9.0 miles before Mary would have caught me, but today the 7.25 was a really good distance and I was very happy with the pacing. Pretty consistent and all the splits were in the no-zone for training, but the heat upped the difficulty considerably.

A very good run.