Turning the Screw

I might have overdone things a bit on Tuesday as the legs were not very happy with me on Wednesday morning. I let myself go as slow as I wanted to on the morning run and ran the first few miles at 7+ but slowly worked the pace down to a 6:46 by the end of the 9 miles. The afternoon run was more of the same with 7 easy miles. The legs and stomach were both knotted up until about mile 4 and then suddenly things started to click. It's been a humid couple of days in Chicago lately, and I think that I might finally be getting used to it. I was really struggling with it earlier in the season.

Today called for a 5 mile tempo run and to say that I was not looking forward to it would be an understatement. I spent the morning trying to talk myself out of it, and almost did on several occasions. However, once lunchtime rolled around, I found myself almost subconsciously, packing up my running stuff and heading over to the gym to change. Things felt sluggish during my two mile warm-up and I still had my doubts about whether I was up for a tempo run today, but finally I talked myself into giving it a go and seeing what happens. Sometimes you just have to force the body to run hard even on days that you don't feel like it. You can't reschedule a race if you don't feel like it.

I intentionally started out a little slower than normal to allow the body to get used to the effort and to try and deal with the humidity, which once again was crazy today. I came through mile 1 in 5:49 and with the wind in my face, I was feeling pretty relaxed. The wind helped keep me somewhat cool, although you couldn't tell it by looking at me as my shoes became squishy somewhere between mile 1 and 2. The wind became more intense as I neared the turnaround point of the run and was howling when I finally reached the turnaround point with a 5:48 overall pace.

Usually there is some relief when I turn around after running into the wind, and while it was nice to not have the wind howling in my face, I quickly realized that these next 2.5 miles were going to get hot. Without the wind to keep me cool, the body started to heat up quickly, however, my I still felt relaxed at the pace I was running and other than being drenched with sweat, things were going good. I finished the run up with my fastest mile of the day, which brought the overall pace for the 5 miles down to 5:40 (5:49, 5:48, 5:47, 5:33, 5:25). It was probably one of the better tempo efforts that I've had this year.