Training Log - Wednesday, June 23, 2010

It's back to early, eraly morning runs again. With this heat and humidity, we have to leave pretty early to get a reasonably long run in without massive heat problems. We met up at Richard's house at the bottom of Monte Sano at 5:15AM. The plan was to run from his house straight up Bankhead Parkway to Tollgate Trail and Cold Spring Trail straight up the mountain to North Loop Trail and the Park Ranger lodge for a refill at the water fountain. We would need it. This run was meant as "hill and heat" training for Claude Sinclair's self-supported Laurel Valley White Water run we have coming up in August. This run is officially billed as a 35 mile run that feels like a 50 miler. It takes place in South Carolina and has some serious heat and even more serious hills and stairs to deal with. However, the Alabama heat and humidity is nothing to laugh at either as we found out again first hand this morning. Figuring that we would be ok heat-wise if we left early enough, we were proven wrong again. A mile into the run, granted it was all uphill for the first half of the run, Richard and I were already soaked in sweat. James was still looking pretty dry, but that would change over the course of the run;-) Suffice it to say that it was a hard and hot run and I guess we better get used to it. It's not even summer yet and the temps coupled with the humidity are just excrutiating. Well, at least we'll be able to prepare in the proper weather conditions. I easily went through two bottles of water during this 9.5 mile training run and it seems I could have used more. I guess I better start using the water bladder and/or more than one bottle on my training runs. There is nothing worse than being thirsty on a hot training run.