Ahhhhh!

What a difference 10° makes. After months of 120° at 5:30 AM -- OK, no, hyperbole alert! -- let's try that again, it just felt like months of 120°. After 4+ days of 74° and 84%+ humidity at 5:30 AM, this morning it was 64° and 83% humidity. It felt so good and I was so glad. I was scheduled to do my first ever hill workout with the Patrick Henry Half Marathon training group and doing that in the heat/humidity combination of the last several days was not going to be pleasant.

About 12 of us met up and did an easy 1 mile warm-up (9:42) and then began our hill workout. The hill was 0.13 miles with an elevation gain of roughly 60'. Based on the pace chart that had been distributed and my goal for the half, I was counting on doing the repeats at 1:16.4. But, having no idea how fast that really was, I just followed the coach. When we turned around at the top, we had done the hill in 53.16 -- hard but not a killer. I ended up doing 5 repeats and was tired but not totally exhausted. It was fun doing that with a group, too -- much better than it would have been by myself.

Here are the figures:

Up: 0:53.16
Down: 1:31.39
Up: 0.54.97
Down: 1:30.14
Up: 0:53.26
Down: 1:32.26
Up: 0:51.67
Down: 1:31.92
Up: 0:51.62

We ended with a .71 mile cool down. When I got home, I did an additional 2 miles to get a total of 4.9 miles at an overall average pace of 8:26 mpm.

After all my moaning yesterday, it looks like at least most of the bad of the last couple of weeks has been, in fact, the weather. I'm just no acclimated to summer mornings, yet.

Run well, y'all,
Bob