I have to admit, that I came out of the Chicago Marathon in the fall kind of worn out. I didn't feel like I really recovered my running speed until recently. And even then, I'm not sure if speed is the right word or not. I'd like to think that there's still room to get faster, but at some point I'll have to accept that all I can do is to try to stave off getting slower. I hope I'm not there yet, but I can't tell for sure.
Anyway, training through the Austin summer is always a tough thing and this summer is the hardest one yet. I gave up running at lunch back in June. The real heat started sometime around the middle of that month, and so I started running exclusively in the mornings. However, I was still swimming at the UT Swim Center three or four days a week, so that limited the time I could focus on running. Once the Swim Center closed (it closes every August for maintenance) I was better able to set my schedule to run regularly in the morning. They closed it early this year, so I have had the last couple of weeks and have up until after Labor day to train on my own.
My general schedule has been run: Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; swim Wednesday and Friday mornings; bike on Saturday if I can. Monday is nominally a swimming day, but I usually end up laying in bed thinking, "I need a day off..."
I feel like my running fitness has been finally coming back to me. I try to do hard intervals or tempo for my Tuesday/Thursday runs and then run long with the guys on Sunday. I should do a race at some point to see if I can gauge my running fitness, but then again every time I think about running a race in 80+ degrees with lots of humidity, I think again. Especially if I'm paying to run ;-) I can suffer like that for free, so maybe the races will have to wait until September or October when we (maybe?) start to see some cooler weather.
