heat wave

The heat makes everything seem like the post-apocalypse, we're all wary of going outside, it's so uncomfortable...Yesterday I ran well before 7 am and it was still extremely slow and uncomfortable.

I'm not going to run today, but that's OK, extreme weather forces a day off.  I started training for the Chicago marathon on July first, and I have a few good weeks, and now one down/recovery week, in the log.  Some races and workouts have told me I'm getting fitter--so I have to keep the pressure up.  This time around, I'm focusing on more of the little things I hate to do: stretching, diet, speedwork.  I'm also trying to extend weekday morning non-workout runs into the 11-12mi/80 minute range.  Looking back on my training, runs in this range, which tend to get me out of the rut of a blah-blah 10mi run comfort zone, have preceded PRs.  I'm also going to focus this time on running a greater percentage of miles at marathon pace--picking a pace and training at it.  It's what Italian coach Renato Cavato calls specific endurance. 

What else.  Because of the extreme weather I had the kid I tutor in English read Jack London's "To Build a Fire," which I think of every time I decide not to risk the heat:

"He remembered the advice of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, and smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone. But it was surprising, the rapidity with which his cheeks and nose were freezing. And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short a time. Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had to look and see whether or not he had hold of it. The wires were pretty well down between him and his finger-ends."

In Man v. Nature plots, Nature wins, so don't tempt the elements.  The version most of us read in high school is a 1908 revision of an original story from 1902 which more explicitly lays out the contrast that works in the above passage between precept and experience--the protagonist decides to chuck precept and learns the hard way that precept was right all along. 

Unlike Klondike exploration, however, training is individualized to physiology, and one's cannot discount one's own experience as an adequate preceptor.  So my precept about experience: take the tips, but listen to your own experience.