Long run day. Dew point was sitting around 80, which if you don't run in Florida summer doesn't mean much, but it means the air's basically already full of water before you start sweating into it. I knew going in it'd be rough. You don't really know how rough until a mile in when your shirt's soaked and your heart rate's already doing numbers it shouldn't be doing yet.
First mile, heart rate around 136. By mile six it was 168, then higher after that. Same pace, same effort — completely different number. That's the heat tax. You're not running harder, your body's just spending twice the energy trying to cool itself while it's also trying to move you forward.
Streets were empty, which was about the only mercy of it. No one else out there dumb enough, prob.
Stopped a couple times. Not proud of it, just being honest. Ducked into a coffee shop at one point and grabbed ice, put some in my pocket, just to have something cold against me. If you look at the splits, one of them balloons out to like 11 minutes for a kilometer — that's the stop, right there, in the data. A few weeks ago I did an interval workout on the treadmill at the gym and ran the fast reps at 6:53 pace. Nowhere close to that Saturday. Heat doesn't care what you did last week.
Finished in 1:27:46, 9:10 pace. Any other day that pace would annoy me a little. Saturday I was just glad to be done. Wasn't pretty. Just grinded through it cause it was on the schedule and I wasn't gonna skip it.
However — I do think days like this make you stronger, eventually. You find out what your body can actually take. But I'd be lying if I said it was the smart move. Sometimes the treadmill really is the better call — controlled temp, controlled pace, no dew point trying to end you. Didn't take that option Saturday. Next time it's this hot, I prob should.
