I crossed the street...

For some reason, I used to think that the ABBA song 'I Had a Dream' contained the lyric, 'I crossed the street' in it.  Presumably, the line should be, 'I crossed the stream/I had a dream' since that makes much more sense.  But I still think of my version when I hear this song.  And today, I did just that.  I crossed the street.  Prior to today's run, which was 18 miles, I could find ways of circling around the northern part of the golf course neighborhood, thereby avoiding having to cross a relatively major street.  Today, since I had to add another mile from the last long run, I decided the time had come.  I was rewarded with some pretty good Florida scenery:

You can actually see parts of the Hillsborough River on this side of the street because not everything is built up.  This picture was taken near a public boat launch.

More of the Hillsborough River

If you're curious to know what this part of Florida would look like had northerners not descended and built golf courses, here is an idea:

Vacant lot right next to the river.

The street next to the river in this neighborhood is also called Riverhills Drive, only it's the southern part and the other half -- which had some of the houses featured previously on the blog -- is the northern part.  They have some pretty ritzy homes on the southern part too:

I just wonder about their cooling bills.

You can actually look out on the river from that giant porch.

Overall, though, today's run was not nearly as enjoyable as the last long run.  In part, this was probably because I shouldn't have been doing a long run today after only 5 days' rest from the previous long run and a 9-mile run on Tuesday.  Physically, though, I didn't feel too awful, at least not any more awful than I would expect from a long run.  And good news, body: you only have one more this week, and it's only 5 miles!  The real problem is that the spectacular cold front is going away.  The temperature at the start of the run was a very palatable 58F, but unfortunately the humidity was around 80%.  By the time I finished the run (many, many hours later), the temperature was already 75F; the RealFeel on Accuweather calculates it at 82F.  Let me tell you: it felt closer to 82F than 75F.

I could actually feel when things were starting to go wrong physically because of the weather.  For instance, before I had my last dose of sport beans, I could really feel my mind starting to wander.  I opted to take three packs and had one each 4.5 miles, which I think was fine overall, but the last one was definitely a necessity.  How could I tell?  I would start coming up with alternatives to my route or thinking about changing what I was doing.  Bad idea.  After I had the sport beans, I just continued on and all went well.  Another issue: if I was in the sun for too long, the same kinds of things started to happen.  Luckily, there was a shady version of the route near the end, but at one point, I think that I was in the sun for a bit too long.  My brain definitely got off track there.

I almost fell again today.  It's time to admit that these aren't flukes, but probably fatigue errors.  It happens.  Not much that can be done about them except to hope that I don't actually fall!