Saturday, February 19, 2011

Back to running, back to humidity

This morning, I ran a 5k with a friend of mine.  My 5k didn't go so well.  Hers was awesome because she completed her first 5k ever where she ran throughout.  Yay!

I've been mulling over why mine didn't go so well (at one point, I walked *shudder*).  In part, it is undoubtedly due to the fact that I haven't been running as much as I would like.  There's no getting around this.  However, now that the deadlines are past, I'm hoping that running can be restored to a normal event on my calendar.  It should be doable for the next little while.

The other part of it, though, is that this morning got humid again.  Not summer hot by any means, but high humidity (low-ish dew point).  Accuweather put the humidity at 93% to start, then rising to 97% (!) by 8am.  Which is to say that in the process of the race, the humidity went up instead of abating.  Ick.  I was reminded of the last time I ran a half-marathon in Florida, which was two years ago as part of the Gasparilla weekend here in Tampa.  The temperature started at a reasonable level, in the 60s, but the humidity was about like this morning.  After the first hour, I wanted to quit and never run in Tampa again unless there was a cold front--actually, this is the race where I vowed to never do a long distance (i.e., over 10k) in Florida again.  Fortunately, a storm came through after the first hour and things were much more manageable, even if there was a driving wind in the wrong direction for a chunk of the race and downpour-level rains.  This was vastly superior to icky sweat. 

In addition, the warm weather returned just a couple of days ago, so there has been no time to adjust.  As I know already, I'm useless in humid weather.  So although I know that I need to step up my workouts (or at least get them back on track), I think that this morning's run was not helped by the weather, not one bit.  I still can't quite believed that I walked, but I just needed to.  I can't explain it any better than that.  My head was pounding like crazy when I did.  Obviously, it's still bugging me.

Along with increasing the number of times I run per week (from zero to a value larger than zero), I'm hoping to add weights for real this time.  Here's how crazy the last month has been: I got a book on weight lifting out of the library, had no chance to read it over the 3-week loan period, and had to give it back since someone else had put a hold on it.  Crazy.  Today's I went and got three more (different) books out and am hoping to find something with a good routine for me in it.  Going twice or three times a week would be great.  However, I don't want to overload myself now that I am able to get back into things because I feel like that would defeat the purpose.

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