Thank you everyone who took the time to wish me a Happy Birthday. I had a great day, ate too damn much birthday cake (Mary made a homemade chocolate with peanut butter frosting cake that is delicious!).

However, earlier in the day, I gave myself a birthday present that was tough on the old boy’s ego!

I went over to the Colby track and made believe that I was somebody name Pre and attempted to run way too fast for this old body. Well sort of, but more on that later.

By time I finished running errands around Waterville, the temps had gone from not too bad to damn warmish. With the sun shining pretty good, running circles around a track without any shade probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

Since I haven’t been able to complete my 12 x .25 workout on a track yet, I planned on doing that. I also wanted to see how the Zoom Fly SP did on the track.

While I did my mile warm-up, between the heat and sun (over 80*F, decent humidity levels and a 8-10 mph breeze), I decided since it was the first of the month to go ahead and do a mile time trial for 4 of the laps and then do 8 more quarters.

Unfortunately, I just couldn’t seem to get the mind/body connection to cooperate with running hard. It was one of the runs where I ran comfortably hard and didn’t push through the veil at all. So even though it was the fastest mile time trial this year, it wasn’t at the effort level I want to be at and as a result I wasn’t able to break through to the sub 7:00 territory that I want be.

That was rather disappointing, but I can see where I need to focus more when I look at the pace graph from Strava. Now to do it.

So with the mile done, I re-focused on getting my quarters done. I did 4 x .25 at a harder pace, but never lifted the veil and never got up on my forefeet, so while they were okay they were not where I wanted to be. However, by the time I finished number, the heat and sun were starting to get to me, so I decided to do 4 x 200m to finish up.

Nope, I finished up two of them I was starting to feel off and knew that it was time to stop. Now this is something that I would never have done in the past. I would have pushed through to finish the original workout, because that is what I needed to do according to whatever plan I was following.

Now that I my training is based more on how I am feeling versus a particular plan, I am more willing to change a workout on the fly and reduce the chance of injury or in this case problems resulting from overdoing it in the heat/sun at hottest part of the day.

While I was disappointed with my effort during my birthday present to myself, at the same time, I was impressed that I was flexible and smart enough to change and then stop the workout when it became obvious that if I continued it would not have been a good thing.

Maybe wisdom is coming to this old fart, slowly but surely. 😉 Now to get to the cooler weather and see if that makes any difference with the mile time trial and completing the rest of the workout.

The Zoom Fly SP did everything I wanted from them during the workout.