August 29 (93 miles/week)

AM: 21.1k tempo, 15 miles

Still in Atlanta, I jogged down to Memorial Park: a perfect 3k loop with little traffic that has been the site of many workouts for me. As many of you know, humidity and I don't agree. It does weird things to me. So when I heard on the local news, "75 degrees with 85% humidity," as I ran out the door, I knew it was going to be a tough one. Taking no fluids or gels made that even more challenging.

The workout went fine in that I hit a good target overall time (1:13:30), while I was shooting for 10:30-10:33, but I faded after going out too aggressively. I'll can share my splits and inner-thought time-stamps with every lap:

10:11 ("Whoops, too fast.")
10:14 ("Still too fast. But I feel good! I'm probably going to pay for this.")
10:15 ("Steady. I'm almost positive going to pay for this.")
10:18 ("Hmm...that's pretty close to the last lap.")
10:34 ("God it's humid. ")
10:31 ("This is officially uncomfortable. Should I bag it now? No. NO. Shut up. Just shut the f*** up. 10 more minutes of fast running.")
10:49 ("Yep, I paid for it.")

At which point I ran another 0.1, stopping the watch right at 1:13:30, putting me about a minute faster than a marathon pace I'll be happy with in Chicago. I was a bit disappointed to miss a race yesterday because this will be a very race-light marathon cycle for me. This almost made up for that. Even though I ran it totally backwards, I'm happy with the workout given the conditions.