For Whom the Dogs Bark

75F, 96% humidity at start, 79F, 90% at end.  Beautiful clear morning, but it was an interesting weekend.  Friday night visiting my daughter and her family, we went out to a popular barbeque joint about 20 minutes out in the country from their house in Central Texas.  We were treated very well, it was all you could eat and we ate to our heart's content.  Then about 24 hours later we started giving it all back.  Food poisoning.  I have no idea how I did my long run on Saturday night, but by noon on Sunday I was pretty weak and as a result I didn't make it out for a run yesterday.

This morning I still felt dizzy and a little weak but thought I should try for a couple of miles at least.  So I put on my flat shoes and took off, and immediately felt better, like I was flushing the toxins out.  One thing about this weather, it is good for flushing.  So I ran the whole route in about 1:36 (hoping to get my new Garmin today), average pace about 9:20.  I sped up on mile 9 then had to slow down for the last mile because my feet in the thin-soled shoes didn't like the crushed granite jogging trail that I use for the last loop.

As soon as I stopped I felt nauseous again, go figure.  I'm feeling tolerable right now and I have a lot to do today, so just pressing on.

One thing I saw Saturday night on my long run I forgot to mention, but I'll do it now.  It was a small thing but memorable to me.  Just at sunset I saw a bunch of people getting out of 2 or 3 vehicles and going into a house, carrying fireworks and side dishes.  No big deal, just another 4th of July party.  But then I noticed, from their accents and dress, that they were Indian Americans.  How cool is that?

79F, 94% humidity, wind ESE 5 mph, nice hot running weather, no chance of catching a cold today.  Got my new Garmin in the mail and strapped it on this morning, ran 10.12 miles at low heart rate in flat shoes.  Average pace 11:04 per mile.  I had some low 10s early in the run but as the internal heat built up I gradually slowed down to mid-11s.  I checked the last low heart rate run I recorded on April 16 at 64F.  The first three miles were almost the same, 11:43, 10:19, 10:11, but my overall pace on that day was 10:25, about the same as my last lap, and I never slowed down much until the last two miles, even then by only a few seconds.  Today my last mile was about 11:40, so at the end of a 10-mile run the heat (only about 15 degrees higher) slows me down by about 1:15 per mile at low heart rate.  After 20 miles I think the effect is even more dramatic, though I have never tried to run that far at low heart rate.  More nerdy stuff, sorry.

One more technical note, if you buy a new Garmin you don't have to buy a new heart rate strap, the old one works just fine.  That might seem obvious, but I thought they might be synching individual monitors with individual machines.  It is a generic piece of equipment.  Probably useless information, though, I don't think you can buy them separately.

On a less technical note, I saw a snake.  Didn't investigate him too closely but I don't think it was a garter snake.

Forgot to check the weather, but it felt like low 70s, starting to rain by the time I finished, nice breeze most of the run.  I ran 10.07 in 1:34:14, regular shoes.  Average pace was 9:22 per mile.  After a 2-mile warmup at low heart rate I ran the rest at about 160 bpm, which translated into a low 8s pace to start, slowing down to high 9s at the end, about 1:45 per minute pace drift, which I attribute mostly to the heat.  The last two miles I moved up to 170-175 bpm and got the pace back into the mid to high 8s.  Overall pace for the last 8 miles was 8:55. 

My idea is to build endurance at marathon heart rate. Maybe running this hard two or three times a week will be fairly sustainable.  The major bust at UVM was not being able to sustain the heart rate late in the race, something I didn't really expect.  Some of that was altitude-related and stomach cramping, but in the end it all comes back to training.  In any event, in this heat there isn't any other way to measure progress that I can come up with.

Toward the end of my run I noticed the jail bus parked right in our neighborhood.  Usually they are out on the road somewhere picking up trash.  My first thought was to direct them to my house, as I have a couple of kids who could benefit from a couple of weeks working on that crew.  Then I got upset when I realized that a busload of budding felons was casing my neighborhood on tax dollars.  Time to write a letter.

76F, 98% humidity, wind S 1 mph, essentially calm.  Ran 10.05 in 1:48:35, average pace 10:48 minutes per mile, flat shoes and low heart rate.  So 16 seconds per mile faster than Tuesday, and after running pretty hard yesterday.  Had to be happy with this run, pace drift was not nearly as pronounced as Tuesday.  My lowest total average pace was 10:43 at about mile 5, so it only went up 5 seconds after that.  Maybe I am getting acclimated to these temperatures that we will have for three more months.  But whatever the reason I was happy to be able to run the whole distance at a decent pace and to have my legs feel good afterward.  The flat shoes experiment seems to be paying dividends, the best case scenario would be if they make me able to run harder with less risk of injury.  I can certainly feel the difference for the better in my knees, and my foot/ankle ligaments and tendons seem to have toughened up.  Calves are fine.  Hips are still getting used to them and the bottoms of my feet always take a pounding, especially when I land wrong on a rock.  They are definitely not good for off-roading.

73F, 97% humidity to start, 82F/85% to end.  Got up dark and early to run with a group at the YMCA located about 8 miles from my home.  I ran 2 miles to my friend's house, drove then started running at 5:30.  He is a little faster than me, but having trouble going long distances in the heat, so he was happy to go a slower speed with me.  We settled on 10 minute miles and kept that up most of the time, running what was supposed to be a 14 mile course with the group but it was only 13.5.  Toward the end the pace picked up quite a bit, down to low 9s.  When we finished we drove back to his house and I ran the last 2 miles home, stiff and slow at first but finally speeding up to low 9s.  I was toying with running home from the Y, but due to the speeding up at the end of the group run I had a heart rate over 170 and knew in the full sunlight it would be a deathmarch, so I took the ride.  Overall pace for 17.51 miles was 9:55, including some slow warmup miles, total time 2:53:52, regular shoes.  I think before the summer is over I will be able to do 20 at a low 9 pace, mid to low 8s would be a fantasy goal.  Today was about a minute per mile faster than last week and I wasn't as tired.  I feel like I am finally getting acclimated.  The other two summers since I started running I had injuries that kept me in the house during the summer, so this is the first time I have been out in the soup week after week.

I am pretty happy with this run.  Took some salt tablets and a little bit of Gatorade without any adverse effects, so branching out from warm water here.  Amazing how fast the time goes by when there is somebody to talk to.  Plus I met some people in the area who are serious about running marathons, one guy I was running with has done 50. 

Not sure I will go out there every week, some Saturdays the program just doesn't fit with what I need to do, but I will probably join the group, they charge dues for Gatorade and such, but not much.  Do running groups in Utah charge dues?  It makes sense but I hadn't really heard of it.  Here in Texas we always organize, it seems.  At the Alamo we weren't organized and we learned our lesson.