9 miles easy

I had the day off from work today and procrastinated until about 12:30 and decided to go out and do my run in the heat of the day.  I'll just tell myself I'm trying to train in adverse conditions to build mental toughness.  I decided to wear my garmin and heart rate monitor and try to use my heart rate as a guide to make sure I was running easy enough.  I wanted to keep my heart rate under 165 since that is usual at a level where I'm not pushing it too hard.  I don't know if with the heat today - 80 degrees, sunny out - if it was a realistic level.  I ran the first 7 miles keeping my heart rate between 160 - 165 and I was running at 7:35 - 7:40 pace most which felt painfully slow to me and I was getting really bored.  With about 2 miles left I figured I had run slow enough for long enough and I picked up the pace to finish up the run.  I wasn't pushing it too hard and I ran the last couple miles at about 7:15 pace and my heart rate got up to about 168 - 169 at the end.  If it had been 50 degrees out, I probably could have run low 7:00 pace and hit my desired heart rate.  I'll have to talk to Sean sometime about whether using a HR monitor to watch my easy runs when it is warm out will do much good.  I know a couple years ago he said that if you are running in the summer in Houston, it's always so warm that you probably wouldn't really be able to run at a reasonable pace and hit the target HR range.

You always seem to see some interesting people out at the park.  There is one guy that I've seen quite a few times today and he rides a bike over to the park and always wears a long sleeve shirt, jeans, sunglasses, a hat, and some sort of covering under the hat or that is part of the hat that comes out the back and covers the back of the head and neck to keep sun off.  He always sits on one of the benches just on the south side of the golf course parking lot and watches the people go by for hours on end.  I usually see him if I have a day off and I am running in the middle of the day.  And the most interesting person I saw today was a guy who was wearing tight blue jeans, a mesh fabric top that it like an old school football jersey that you wear over pads that was short enough to show off the guys belly, a fanny pack, and he was roller blading on some sort of roller blade/skate that I don't think I'd ever seen before.  Each one had 3 wheels that were about 4" in diameter which were larger than anything I think I'd ever seen.

I won't be doing the Rodeo Run tomorrow and with the warm weather I'm kind of glad.  It has a late start and can be a pretty brutal race when it is hot and sunny out.  I'll be getting up early to do a 22 miler with the Kenyan Way group.