"There are no compromises." -Once a runner

12 miles around percy warner park on the roads. The trip to california was fun, but the flight back was horrible and made me miss my run yesterday. I got delayed twice and ended up home 5 hours after my initial schedule said. I loath the nashville weather. It is just coming into its own for the summer with today's 97 and 80% humidity. I waited till as late as I could to run and the start of the run was 93 and the end was 89. And with the humidity sweat hardly does anything except collect in your shoes, shorts, and sometimes gets so much in your eyes you have to pour water over them to stop the sting. I know that sports drinks dont have as much salt as sweat does because I know they dont burn the eyes the same way that sweat does (although perhaps its something like uric acid in sweat that does that, hmmm). Anyway, im pretty much counting the days until I am at least up in providence with slightly better temps and much less humidity.

Ran an unplanned tempoish run.  Was with ted and despite the 92 degree start and tons of humidity we hit a few 7's to start off and then got a bit faster towards the end.  Finished at around 6:45 pace.

I did another workout with my pathetic group.  I should have just gone out later by myself, but it seemed stupid... until I saw the workout.  3x200 800 3x200 800 3x200, 100 recovery between 200's and 400 between sets.  Because this workout was so minimal I decided to run it pretty hard.  I didn't get my 200 splits because I forgot my watch, but I got my times for each 3x200 including the recovery (totaling 800).

3x200 2:45

800 2:33

3x200 2:41

800 2:29 (not bad considering I was pretty tired and it was fairly hot, didnt feel too too hard, even with the previous running I am confident that I could have strung two of these together if it had been a race, I would say I am in 4:43-46 shape for a cold windless mile)

3x200 2:36 (as the workout went on I kept my speed on the 200's but just increased my speed on the recovery)

so that including 3 miles up, 2 miles down, and the recoveries made decent but still insufficient mileage.  I am gonna have to run pretty long tomorrow in the evening and friday in the morning because friday evening I am going home and don't like to do more than 10/day at home (my parents think I run too much).  

18.2 miles at a decent pace (7:45) for me at this point on this course which is very hilly. One crazy thing happened. At mile 12 it was dark and a bird obviously mistook my head for some small animal and tried to catch it. I heard some wings and then felt talons on my head. My natural response was just to sprint for a bit so when I turned around I couldn't see the bird. But it freaked me out a bit.

AM: 6 only 10 hours after the long run. I stretched well after the long run but the pavement took its toll. My hips were a bit sore this morning. I don't think my body is used to running on roads anymore. Oh well, with my time constraints this week I just need to get the miles in as fast as possible so unless every run is a tempo run I need to do some pavement.

PM: 3 wanted 6 but between work and family obligations I needed to pull a quickie.  So I'll have to do 13.something tomorrow.  Sunday there is a race in my hometown.  Last year the winner went 18:06 which I think I could beat even with no taper.  I will go and see how fast they go out in the first mile.  If anyone is under 5:40 I will just tempo the rest of it.  Between the heat and no taper I don't think it is worth it.  On a cold flat course well tapered I think I could go 17 flat now, but I have had several hard days recently trying to catch up the mileage from not running on sunday.

Did the outback steakhouse 5k. Time was 18:57. I didn't race the whole thing, but it was a very hard tempo run. How pathetic is that time? I went out with the leaders for a while but then dropped back a bit. They went through the first mile in 5:20 and I went through in 5:40 and I knew in that heat and humidity I didn't have a chance. So I settled into what I thought was a 6 minute pace. The course was a little strange though and although they had the half miles marked, I went through the second half mile (of the second mile) 20 seconds slower than the first half mile of the second mile, which I also though was slow. So the second 'mile' was like 6:25. I am pretty sure it was long. Then the third mile I felt like I slowed down because I was alone in 5th but went faster than the second mile. Anyway, it was a solid workout. But I don't want to think about the time. If the course was accurate, could the heat and humidity hurt that much? It was only 76 degrees actually. But it was 100% humidity with a very slight rain. Got the mileage in because of a 2.1 mile warmup and 3 separate cooldowns, lol. First one was 2 miles, then ran the course twice with different people while waiting for awards.

EDIT: Yeah, I just checked other race times and everybody did about 30 seconds slower at this race than on other harder courses when it was hotter. And those races are recent. So it must have been around 150m long.