hoping something's clicked

I've been in several conversations with El Capitan over the summer about the weather, and specifically about the humidity. The humidity, out here on the east coast and in Indianapolis has been a bitch. And this has been my first real summer of running in this nonsense. I didn't really start running till late August of last year, and when I did that it was mostly in a gym. I reveled in those days when there'd be a break in the humidity allowing me to run further and faster than before.

But here's something else. I lost nearly all of June as far as training. It was probably less than a 50 mile month. Just nagging ailments. So you couple June's loss, with July and thus far August's challenges to training and I should be falling back.

Thing is I feel stronger and quicker than I have yet. El Capitan and I had spoken numerous times about the humidity making us stronger. Half the time we would be attempting to convince ourselves. At least half the time I forced myself to believe it.

But, in the mean time, it has altered my training a bit. In the winter/spring, my base runs were about 6-7 miles. This served as a good base training run as I was working towards the Indianapolis Half Marathon. But, as the summer has gone on, I've seen my base runs basically be 4 miles. One 6 miler or longer in there per week.

Now, I've never run on the track. So I've never done speedwork in the way that we are told to do speedwork by coaches, books, and magazines. My training in the winter and spring would just be get out there and run. Run quicker on the days you can, and run farther on the days you can.

But somehow, results are starting to show from summer training. Now it could be that humidity does in fact make us stronger. But it could be this. It's almost as if my four mile runs have been multi time per week tempo runs. I mean, I'm desperately trying to get those runs in in the 7-7:15 splits range, with anticipation of getting under (and staying under!) 7 minute splits in the future. It's not true speedwork. It's not quite training at race pace. But it's close.

But the next challenge, especially if I'm looking towards the Philly Distance Run on September 21, is to translate that to longer distances.

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