I won an award for today’s run. Hint: It wasn’t for the fattest pace ever!
Now, my pace today was 6:10/km, which is fine, but far from spectacular. It’s a full 16 seconds off last Wednesday’s pace, in fact, so how did I manage to burn a record number of calories? Well, there are a lot of factors involved–hydration level, amount of sodium I’ve ingested recently and so on. And then there’s that one persistent thing that has accompanied me on pretty much every run this summer:
HUMIDITY
Go ahead, pretend I somehow re-enabled the <BLINK> tag on the above, to get the full intended effect.
Once again, high humidity plagued my run, and I have resigned myself to facing it for the rest of the summer. I’ll probably have to wait until the cooler temperatures of fall before it no longer factors into how my runs go. Today felt like a slog, due to the combo of warm temperatures, sun and the H-word.
That said, I did manage a full 10K and the left hip started out fine, then started being a mild bother about 2K in before settling down and not particularly being an issue for the last few km. What kind of threw me was starting farther up from my usual spot today due to trail work. Every time I’d expect to hit a milestone, I would still have a ways to go, and I ended the run right at the dam, instead of well before it. It felt weird and made the whole thing feel even more slog-like.
My pace was actually pretty consistent, though. Observe:
| Kilometer | Pace per km |
| 1 | 5:50 (zippy start) |
| 2 | 6:13 (slow to 150 BPM) |
| 3 | 6:13 |
| 4 | 6:12 |
| 5 | 6:12 |
| 6 | 6:12 |
| 7 | 6:04 (boost from Cottonwood Trail) |
| 8 | 6:17 (course becomes more technical, I slow down) |
| 9 | 6:17 |
| 10 | 6:05 (sprinting to make it all end sooner) |
Also contributing to the slog-like effect today was the return of the No-wind. This is another peculiar phenomenon that has only occurred this summer. I mean, here we are two-thirds through the season, with little precipitation in the last month, and the forest fire danger is still only Moderate (one step above the lowest level, which is cleverly called Low).
Anyway, enough kvetching, here are the stats:
Run 705 Average pace: 6:10/km Location: Burnaby Lake (CW) Start: 9:58 a.m. Distance: 10.02 km Time: 61:47 Weather: Mostly sunny Temp: 22-24ºC Humidity: 51-59% Wind: nil to light BPM: 152 Weight: 161.1 Total distance to date: 5172 km Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Brooks Caldera 5 (280 km)
