Training Log - Sunday, July 18, 2010

It was definitely an early morning, when my alarm went off at 3:20 AM this morning. The schedule called for a 20 mile long run and since Mike had family plans at 8AM, we had to squeeze it in there somehow. Even though the temps were ok, the humidity was extremely high.Well, it might have been better to sleep in a little. While it was definitely a fun run for me, we barely managed to get 9 miles in. Richard's ankle was bothering him pretty good, but that really shouldn't have been an excuse for me to cut my run short. Mike and I could have kept going, but somehow I was ok just running a 9 mile trail run. We headed out on the first loop of the Dizzy Fifties race course on Monte Sano Mountain at 4AM. It was pretty cool, we all had to use headlamps, which provided another great opportunity to training night running without really running at night. However, even though we ran in the dark for about an hour, we kept a very decent pace for a mountain top trail run in total darkness. Our pace was just above 10 minutes for the first few miles, but we slowly settled into a pace slightly slower than that. I am starting to get just a little worried about Richard's ankle situation. We just received our scheduled start times for the Laurel Valley White Water Run (>35 miles) and I realized that it is only four weeks from today. In any case, while we did cut the run short, we all felt really good afterwards like we "didn't run at all". But the humidity cannot be underestimated as I am clearly struggling to deal with just that. Tomorrow calls for a 7 mile tempo run.