Hills, Florida-style

This morning's workout was 4-6 long hills.  Before you scoff, I did pretty well as far as hills in Florida go, I think:

Florida hill

There is a definite upwardness to the land here.  It's about as hilly as I'm going to get in this part of Florida, I think.  Also, it is conveniently located in the golf course neighborhood across the street and offers some hills on the way there and back from where I parked today.  All in all, I felt like hill training went okay.  Also, I felt like I ran the hills okay, so maybe I learned something while in Pittsburgh.

It was warm, but not as bad as it could have been.  Also, the shade--which is ample, as you can see from the photo--was extremely helpful.

A le recherce du savoir-faire perdu (In Search of Lost Skills)

I can't remember the last time I had a week when I planned to run two days in a row and actually did it.  Progress!  Only three more to go this week (whoo?).

Today's run was 4 miles.  Yes, I can still run 4 miles, and what is more, I can do so without dying.  Big advantage over trying this in Florida at this time of year.  My time was still meh, although I am not thinking too hard about that.  Right now is not about improving the time, right now is about improving the actually going out and running part.

There are a couple of other things that could stand for some improvement.  For instance, I have zero ability to run up hills.  I did manage to find one today, although it was actually an overpass, not an honest-to-goodness hill.  I could feel that there were muscles, somewhere, that used to be able to tackle things like hills.  I could also tell that those muscles have not had much of a workout as of late.  With any luck, I will be able to locate another hill (or reasonable facsimile) so that I can improve.  Then there is always Pittsburgh...

I also think I've lost the ability to zone out for long periods of time while running.  Instead, I check my Garmin obsessively, counting down 10%, 5%, and near the end of the run, even every 1% (I may have also noted 2.5%, but that's pretty easy when you are running 4 miles).  Hopefully I can get back to the zoning out and not noticing how long the run is taking.  It's a good skill to have when you are a slow runner.

The only way to get better, though, is practice.  Here is hoping that I am back on track.

Not quite full runs lately, but instead activities that are kind of like full runs.

I did get a couple of runs (or something...) in over the past few days.  Pittsburgh's hills are still my nemesis.  I think that they will require a long and extensive training plan before I can actually tackle them.  On Sunday, I went for a 4-mile 'run,' which wound up being more of a 3.5-mile run, followed by a 0.4-mile walk up ridiculous hills, then 0.1's worth of finishing where it leveled out.  Apart from the insane hills, the run was quite pleasant.  But it was awfully hard to get past the insane hills part.  Someday.  Maybe.  I am reminding myself that even when I was pretty far along in the marathon training, I gave up trying to run Pittsburgh hills.

The one positive that came out of this was a new motivating thought that I had: even though the hills feel awful, every step is bringing improvement.  It sounds much better now that I am writing it down, but the general gist of that was in my head after a while.  Probably right before I started walking.

But hey, I did almost manage to kind of run 4 miles, right?

Today it was HOT.  Stupid HOT.  As in 93F at 6pm.  Words cannot express how much I did not want to run in that.  So I decided to aquajog instead.  Was it running?  Not really.  Was it better than nothing?  Absolutely.  I did 40 minutes and got to hear a long and detailed conversation between two older ladies who knew pretty much everything about our condo association that you have ever needed or wanted to know.  This conversation took up pretty much the entire forty minutes.  And some people think that pretending to run around a pool could be boring.  For shame.

Tomorrow = destination Munich (okay, I won't get there until Thursday, but it's very soon).  I looked at a map today and there are acres and acres of green near me.  Here is hoping that they are not acres and acres of green with Pittsburgh-level hills.  Or maybe that would be a good thing?

All things considered, it wasn't so bad

Today's run was a 50-minute jaunt at a reasonable pace, followed by some hill training...er, 'hill' training.  I used the same 'hill' that I ran for my marathon training, which is not really a hill per se.  Unless you are in Florida.  In which case it meets the criterion.

Actually, there is a hill buried in the golf course neighborhood which might be even better, forgot about it until later today.  However, for the purpose for getting a bit of hill training in, I think that today's was just fine.  I did six reps up the hill, then walked back down.  Not particularly challenging, but enough to definitely get me tired.

The 50-minute run was okay except that it was really freaking humid out.  I felt more sluggish all day that I would have hoped, but I am going to chalk that up to humidity instead of freaking out about it like I usually do.  Today was rather out of control, though: like in the 90% range.  At least there was a breeze and it was decently cool.  Actually, it was less awful than I thought (but less awful does not mean perfect).