Heat and Humidity...

I'm officially scheduled to do my first 20 miler of this training cycle tomorrow, however the weather has thrown a bit of a wrench into those plans. The forecast is calling for humidex values over 40C (104F) tomorrow, as well as thunderstorms and heavy rain in the morning and late afternoon. I can deal with the rain (although the electrical activity is a concern), but given my issues with carrying enough fluid over the last few weeks that would be a hard combination to try and pull off.

Ideally, I would have done the long run this morning instead and avoided the problem altogether. Unfortunately, I had to push Wednesday's 12 miler back to Thursday, so between that and the 10 miler on Friday (six of which were at Tempo pace) my legs weren't in any shape to go that distance today. After the 5 mile recovery run this morning, they're feeling a lot better but they're still not 100% at this point.

As such, I'm strongly considering deferring this run to Monday morning and possibly doing Tuesday's 6 mile recovery run tomorrow instead (so Tuesday is free for recovering from the 20 miler). It's still going to be in the mid-30s then, and there will likely be some heavy rain to deal with, so it won't be ideal. Between those two scenarios however, I think the latter will be more beneficial to my overall training - as slogging through those temperatures would likely do more damage than good (considering the race is in October).

The one other downside with this plan is that I'm scheduled to do 14 miles on Wednesday, so that will likely be difficult two days after a 20 miler. I'll likely work around that by doing the 20 early in the morning and the 14 in the late afternoon, as that should buy me a few more hours of recovery. I would move it around as well, however next Sunday calls for another marathon pace run so I don't want to mess that up ;)

Either way, I'll be gathering up all of the information I can tomorrow morning and play it by ear - but if things stay the way they are suggesting, I'm likely to go down this route. Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do about the weather so it's just a matter of working around it at this juncture ;)