I guess it's good for mental toughness?

It remains hot.  Today it got up to 90F.  That is, in fact, summer weather.  And the humidity this morning was in the ick range of 90%.  I looked at the prediction last night and decided that I would risk running later.  This was a gamble because there were clouds gathering and some of them looked pretty scary -- not quite on par with the photos from a few weeks ago, but still a bit ominous.  As I got started, I heard some distant thunder, but that was the only trace of an actual storm during the run, apart from a few sudden wind gusts.  I decided to run anyway and knock off one of the two 5-milers that need to be done.  One of them has sprints in it.  I saved that one for the weekend.  Here's hoping that the 'cold front' is passing through tonight and getting rid of some of this weather.

I didn't take my phone for a few reasons:

• I feared inclement weather
• There is a really convenient 5M run that doesn't require the phone (you run down some streets, around, up a street, then back.  Trust me, it's easy in practice)
• I didn't want to get going too fast.  Rational Me knows that when it is hot, your body needs to slow down.  Rational Me can look at mile split times when she gets back and understand that she was slow because of weather conditions (Rational Me is also a big fan of AccuWeather).  However, Rational Me is not the one that typically goes running....well, that's obvious, because Rational Me probably thinks that this whole marathon idea is nuts.  Irrational Me, on the other hand, gets frustrated because the mile splits are too slow, weather be damned.  Tonight, I didn't feel like dealing with Irrational Me.  So the timing devices (phone and watch) stayed at home.

I also left my visor at home, but that was more because I figured that I wouldn't need it with the sun setting.

Again, it was not an enjoyable 5M, nowhere near as easy as the ones I was running in previous weeks.  But I did it and that's what matters.  As I was running, I thought to myself that I should probably be grateful that the weather hasn't been like this for all of October and that it was actually reasonable by Florida standards.  I'm sure that, had the weather been summer-hot all month, I would still have run.  But it would have been nasty.  So I'm glad that there was some respite.

Plus this all goes in to the 'mental toughness' category.  It would have been really, really easy to skip tonight's run.  It would have been really, really easy to cut tonight's run short because of a possible storm.  But I didn't.  Truth be told, it wasn't physically so bad -- 5 miles is still a lot less than most recent running days.  However, I am still sweaty and my head hurts, so it could have been much better.

Come on COLD FRONT!