Hello my friends! Guess what? Thanks to your advice and enthusiasm, I ran 10 miles this morning with my friend Kathleen, and I didn’t feel like death! 🙂 What changed? Well, per your advice we started earlier, stuck with shadier routes, and I also just felt so much more motivated after reading all of your inspiring comments. One of my favorite was, “Why run? Because we can.” So true. Thank you for the reminder. 🙂 That, and being reminded to not worry about pace or walking breaks when it’s this hot!
Funny story, in case you didn’t already read about it on my Instagram – see how my Garmin has a hair tie attached to it? Well, it’s been SO hot in DC this week that the glue that holds my Garmin watch together actually melted!! It was literally opening up today and I had to improvise and secure it with the only thing I had on hand – an extra hair tie. I’m so glad it worked! I’ve had the watch for 5 years now, so I’m wondering if I should go the superglue route or perhaps just go for a replacement. We’ll see.
Kathleen and I had some gorgeous views on our run this morning and we had fun chatting the whole way, too. My favorite view was this picture of the sun rising over the tidal basin, with views of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. So pretty – and we had it practically all to ourselves!
We finished and started the run on the National mall, which was rough since there’s not a lot of shade. But the rest of the run took us around the tidal basin and along Hains Point, down the waterfront, up Rock Creek Park quite aways, and back. Most of it was nice and shaded and with water breezes, so while it was of course really hot, it wasn’t terrible. We also took a couple short breaks. I brought an espresso Hammer Gel – the caffeine really helped!
Here are our splits:
- Mile 1: 9:18
- Mile 2: 9:12
- Mile 3: 9:17
- Mile 4: 9:20
- Mile 5: 9:37
- Mile 6: 9:27
- Mile 7: 9:04
- Mile 8: 11:17 (forgot to stop the watch while we were waiting at a light)
- Mile 9: 8:52
- Mile 10: 9:03
I was really pleased with the pace given the heat, and I felt good the whole time, too, which is way more than I can say for my runs over the past 3 weeks, so yay!
10 miles was actually my long run for this week – I got it out of the way early because I have a friend coming into town this weekend and we want to be able to sleep in and go to yoga on Saturday, and on Sunday we’re doing the Merrell Down & Dirty 5k obstacle run! Should be a blast. 🙂
When I arrived home, I had my standard chocolate milk (read more about my pre/during/after running nutrition in my Marathon Training Plan post from yesterday if you missed it), and then after getting cleaned up I enjoyed one of my favorite breakfasts – my High Protein Breakfast Pancake. Yep, still obsessed.
I hope you all have a great night – anyone else have any hot running successes this week? 🙂
