Hot early morning run...

Joy here...okay, so I got up bright and early this morning (around 4:30am-ish). Since I'm so far north here in Canada, the sun was up shortly after 5:00am, and by 6:00am I was out the door for a run, in a vain attempt to beat the heat. While I should be used to the heat and humidity after spending the month of May in tropical Malaysia, when the weather gets this hot and humid here in Canada, I'm always surprised. It's like my body can deal with it in Malaysia, but here, my body seems to scream "what's going on? It's CANADA for goodness sake!" The temperature this morning was 23 C, but with the humidity, the weather network tells me that it "feels like" 35 C. So I started off the run at an easy pace of around 6:00min/km for the first 5km. It took about 30 minutes to reach the 5km mark. At that point, I was incorporating strides into my run. I didn't know what strides were until my husband explained it all to me, and strides are where you pick up the pace for about 100m and run at about 70-80% of your max speed in order to kick your body into a new gear. Apparently (according to my husband, again), serious runners all incorporate strides into their workouts, and even though I've never actually really read many running books, it seems like a good idea to me. So after 5kms, I did 6 strides in total. Basically I ran faster for a slow count of 20 seconds, and then recovered for another little while before doing it all over again.

So today's total stats are:

8.79km at 5:48min/km with 6 100m strides