It’s stinking hot in Sydney today and for the last week or so, and on the Sunshine Coast up in Queensland in Australia, the Gold Coast obviously, too, it’s been even worse.
So, at no other time is it probably more important to bring discipline to the table.
Especially in regards to your run training, we keep ego to the side.
You know, what’s so prevalent out there is people getting this idea that their predetermined training paces based on tests and or races that are run in completely different conditions, aka cooler conditions, are applicable in this sort of weather.
Totally not. Let’s take an example.
I had my pro guy Michael Fox do a run yesterday, I just wanted a tempo run, 3:50-3:55/km. He’s not yet in his best shape, so that’s a bit slower than normal.
But I said to him, I said “look mate, you might be around 4:05/km or so, given the conditions”. That was my prediction.
As it turned out, 4:10-4:15/km was where he ended up for the same feel. It was that hot, that humid, and it was that much stress, that much rising lactate in his blood, that much core temperature rise, that much perceived effort level increase…that this is what it took to have the same feel as his normal three 3:50-3:55/km pace.
These are the sort of adjustment you’ve gotta make, rather than, as I say, this heading out the door feeling a compulsion to run to these predetermined paces that are based on very different conditions.
To call those paces up on the day might even turn such a workout into something that’s close to your threshold, and a very different sort of stress.
If you find yourself in that situation and you’re halfway through and you think, “crap, this is bloody difficult now, and I don’t think I can get through the set at this level,”…you pull it up and you call it a different set, and you say, “well, okay, this is enough load at this intensity”, it’s now actually probably close to threshold or might be at whatever, let’s just say it’s a different load, different intensity, and therefore it requires a different quantity-of-quality.
Otherwise, your next few days of training and your whole week in general may well be compromised.
So that’s how I’d go about it there, and make the adjustments. There’s some insights.