I tried to run this morning, but was felled (okay, not exactly felled; maybe just really frustrated) by a borderline case of heat exhaustion. I set out from my parents' house at an easy pace and immediately felt... not right. I was hoping for a minimum of 12 miles, but ended up with 8.5 and spent some time sprawled in the front yard cursing the heat, humidity, and general unpleasantness of the atmosphere. When I got up from my self-pitying sprawl, I was light-headed and sick to my stomach; my face felt hot and my skin felt tingly. I had heat exhaustion several times in high school (like the time we raced the 3200 at 5pm when it was 104 degrees), and I knew I was on the verge of being sick. I cooled down inside for a while--thanks very much to presence of my parents, which meant I didn't have to go right into kid-duty after the run. Now, half a day later, I still feel "off." It's going to be a long summer...
I was thinking today (during the aforementioned sprawl) about why my running is so awful right now. I'm doing half as many miles as I was in California, at a slower pace, and still having a hard time. Part of it is the temperature and humidity, I know. And I did admittedly lose fitness during the months preceding the move, when our house was on the market and husband was working on the weekends. But I shouldn't feel this bad, every day. (And, no, I'm not pregnant again.) But I think that these factors are compounded by the fact that I'm running on hard surfaces. In CA, I ran on trails 100% of the time (either dirt roads or singletrack); here, I'm running on hard surfaces 95% of the time. I was relatively free of debilitating injuries for a long stretch of time before we moved, and I always felt sufficiently recovered, even after 20+ miles every weekend in the hills. Here, I'm doing my weekday runs through our neighborhood, in the early morning dark. It's really my only option, for a number of reasons. On the weekend, I try to incorporate a few of the nearby trails, but they only amount to 2-4 miles and are extremely technical--nothing like the rolling dirt paradise of the East Bay Regional Parklands. There are some other trail options in San Antonio, but they require a fair amount of driving for not a lot of trail (Bandera excepted, but that's not a realistic weekend destination for me, especially on my own). I miss the daily soft-surface security of the creek trail, where I could push the stroller for miles on dirt and gravel.
Anyway, I don't think I'm recovering well from one run to the next, and my body isn't happy with the pounding, especially when the pounding occurs at a heat index above 90 (or 100) degrees. I'm sure I'll acclimate. But for now, it's frustrating. I've realized that there's no way I can train this summer for an ultra. Maybe I should just get pregnant and hold out for a long race in the winter of 2011? ;)
Note: The post above makes me sound all doom-and-gloom about Texas. Really, running is the only thing that sucks about our move. Everything else--proximity to parents, nice house in a nice neighborhood, kid-friendliness, husband's career--is firmly in the "pro" column.
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