high heat index...

Saturday morning:

K & I were down by Lake Michigan for our usual Saturday morning long run towards the Chicago Marathon training with our CARA groups. As the temps & humidity was already high when we started to run at 6am I choose again this week to run with the 8:30 minute mile pace group for my first 20 miler of the fall training season and in the long run I'm glad I did. The weather only worstened (high heat index) as the sunrise finally showed up sometime shortly after 6:15am and cooked all the lake front runners like we were in a skillet...

I wore my fuel belt and brought with plenty of thermolyte tabs to stay as nutrionally hydrated as possible during the run duration. I was comfortably running with the 8:30 group sharing the pacing duties until my body was telling me to slow down right at about mile 17 of the run when I was melting from the heat plus my HR got way too high for me during a long slow distance run. I dropped off the back of the pack to a slightly slower mile pace as I controlled the damage of the tough training run...

My 20 mile time was at 2:51:40 for an average mile pace at 8:35 with and average HR for the run at 132bpm. My max HR was at the end of the run (at a slower pace) of 152bpm which told me my body was cooked...actually when I reviewed the Polar HR graph at home later in the day I saw a sharp jump in my HR from mile 16 till the end of the run. Not a good day for me with a weaker finishing pace but the run is in the books and it was the best I could due on this challenging weather day...the run kinda reminged me of the Chicago Marathon in 2007...a scorcher indeed.

After I finished I headed out into Lake Michigan for my usual cold water bath for about 40 minutes which refreshed me right away as I felt much better after doing that :-)

b