AM - Headed to City Park for a brief session on the track. Conditions were 82 F / 78 dew point -- that's about as bad as it gets at 6 am.
I'm trying to figure out my training plan. I'm not going to race until October because conditions are so terrible. And I want to run well in April. So that's a long period of time for one long training cycle... but I'm concerned it's too humid to handle any serious workouts for the next 3 months.
So I'm going to experiment a little with various workouts in the coming weeks and see how they feel. I've adapted to some extent to the humidity, but you can really only adapt so far. Today I wanted to try a little threshold pace and mile pace. Ideally I'd like to just spend the next 3 months doing mostly those types of workouts, race a little bit in October-November, then do a really good buildup into the spring.
The plan was 2-3 x 1600m @ 5:30 goal pace with 1:00 rest, then 8 x 200m with plenty of rest.
I went 5:25 and 5:28 and felt pretty bad. I even increased the rest to 2:00. I guess there's nothing like long intervals to overheat, and increasing rests doesn't do much to dissipate that heat.
I took 3:00 and then jumped into the 200s. They went 33.7, 33.7, 34.5, 33.7, 37.5, 35, 35, 35.
I took a little extra rest after #4 to try to cool down. Bad idea. All that happened is I stood on the track in the still air and got hotter and hotter... so that didn't work out. #5 was 37.5 because I was so hot. But like a car with a bad radiator fan, just moving fast helped cool me down.
Threshold workouts might still work out, but I'm thinking I'll shorten the reps to 800-1200m, slow them down a little, and increase the moving rest.
AM 2 - I won't have time to run this afternoon, so I took a few hours rest and went out for a super-easy 4 miler with Rylie. No watch, but estimating 8:00 pace. Very, very hot.
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