Raise Your Hand If...

With daytime highs in the mid 90s (it hit 99 Sunday), morning lows only briefly dipping into the upper 70s, and high humidity around the clock, it's hard to get in good quality runs during Houston summers. Oh, you can run long and slow, or you can run short and fast, but you need that rare window of blessedly cooler air to combine both and run long and fast. Tonight was such a night. Raise your hand if you took advantage of it.

At about 7 PM this evening the rain started coming down in buckets out here in Sugar Land but when it was over 45 minutes later it was noticeably cooler. Even though I had eaten at 6:30 PM I headed over to Riverpark to take advantage of the moderate conditions and run the 10.2 mile route over there at an aggressive pace.

It was tough going for most of the run as it felt like I had a brick in my stomach. My pace was compromised because of that but I hammered as best I could. I felt a little better for the second half of the run. The Garmin wasn't charged so I had just the stopwatch on, and with no benchmarks for this course I knew only that it would be roughly 10.2 miles when I finished, and nothing short of that. In other words I had no way of knowing how fast I was going until it was nearly over.

I had calculated what total number I'd need to hit in order to average 6:30 (1:06:18) so as I got within a mile of the finish I really started moving. I knew it was going to be close. I finished in 1:06:20, a 6:30 average. I'm sure there was at least another five seconds a mile to be had in my pace if I didn't have the digestion issue so I'm pleased with the effort. I've been needing a run like this for a while. Speedwork and long, slow stuff will only get you so far. You sometimes have to combine speed and distance.