Surviving the heat

This past week was a scheduled 'down' week where I cut my volume to 47.5 miles, but I still got in some good workouts despite the 80-90 degree heat, plus humidity. Last Tuesday I had a good session of 3 x 10 minutes at tempo effort in the metro park and on Thursday I did some long hill repeats. This week will be a bump up again with me back in the 65-70 range. Today was an especially nasty day with temps pushing 90 when I ran a 7 mile progression. The goal was to start at 'normal' effort and work down 10-15 seconds per mile. On paper not that hard at all, but just being out in the heat that long today was a workout in itself. Anyway, I started at 7:24 and then went 7:08, 6:56, 6:44, 6:29, 6:20, 6:10. The pace didn't feel difficult at all, but it felt hard to really accelerate on the last 2 miles without feeling like I would pass out from the heat. On cooler days I've done similar workouts like this MUCH faster, so today was one of those days where I had to just adjust to the conditions and roll with it. Looks like my next race will be a 5 miler on Labor Day weekend.