It's summer heat, or nearly hot enough to feel like summer, around here. The weekend has been lovely, but this past week and a few prior have days peaking at 90+ degrees. The weather has given me pause to figure out how I'm going to combine my goal of qualifying for the Boston marathon in October during my maiden marathon in Atlanta with the simple, pure joy I have when I'm out trotting down the road with my dog next to me.
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| Cooling down after a warm evening run |
I find myself beginning to select pieces of training from my years of agility competition, run training, triathlon training and even the sporadic riding lessons I took for a couple of summers, in an effort to incorporate more time with the dogs while measuring my strides toward the "goal".
To answer the weather change, I'm drawing from Mary Bromiley and her book "Fit to Ride". In her discussion of joint flexibility in Chapter 8 she references walking as passive stretching for joint mobility as a means for warming up. One of the ways I warm the dogs up is with a head to tip of tail massage (learned from Dr. Christine Zink in "Peak Performance; Coaching the Canine Athlete"). Since it has become so hot, and I'm forced to walk the dogs more than run, I'm using this portion of my run time for their modified summer exercise and my warm up.
It seems their climate "limitations" are tempering me. I'm learning to reflect back on the lessons I've taken in over the past decade of training in various sports and gather pieces from each that benefit both canine and human in this adventure. I am thrilled that my per mile times are beginning to improve, even in the heat and neither dog nor I am encountering overuse injuries that are keeping us off the road for extended recoveries.
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| Maddie impatiently waiting for her harness |
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