Ran in Gainesville's Three-Mile Melon Run This Morning

Five years ago, during one of my trips to Hollywood in south Florida to visit my father, I decided to go for a run around my old subdivision of Boulevard Heights.  I had it all mapped out with the mileage I was going to run, using a computer application to accomplish this.  I checked out the local temperature and humidity just before I set out on my run: 80 degrees, 82%.  I ran the unpleasant four miles and, after a few minutes back in the house, regurgitated all of the Gatorade I had drunk.  I felt bad the rest of the day and promised myself never to run when both temperature and humidity were 80 or above...and I never had a similar incident since then.  For when it is both hot and very humid, the body is prevented from cooling itself through perspiration by the intensity of moisture in the air...and can overheat to dangerous levels... 

Fast forward to this morning and Gainesville's annual Fourth of July race, the three-mile Melon Run...organized by the Florida Track Club and held at Westside Park.  I could feel that it was warm and muggy, but not how much so.  Anyway, I was going to take the race easy, running at a comfortable pace for me.  I also knew that the course had a long, challenging upwardly sloping section...well, challenging at least for a lifelong Floridian as myself, used to running on flat surfaces.  What I didn't know, until I was halfway through the race, was that they had drastically changed the racecourse from the times I had run it in 2010 and 2012.  Instead of having sections of it going east down NW 8th Avenue, cutting northward through Loblolly Woods Park, and then returning to the park via NW 16th Avenue, the organizers simply repeated the first half of the course...which meant having to trudge back up that torturous stretch of gradually ascending pavement northward along NW 31st Drive a second time. Ugh...

I won't mince words: it was an ordeal for me to finish what should have been a simple jog...especially with my final time (by my own watch) of 28:22, just a 9:27 per mile pace.  Of course, the relative hilliness of the terrain was a factor in my difficulty, but it wasn't until I got hold of my cellphone and checked the current weather readings that I fully understood what had happened: 80 degrees, 89% humidity! The conditions ended up being substantially more hazardous than what I had experienced before in south Florida...

After all of this, I have to come away from my experience this morning feeling that I'm in better shape than I initially had thought, having successfully withstood some very challenging circumstances with no adverse effects to show for it all.  Now to begin working to return to a higher level of running endurance...