This week's runs

I caught a break in the weather this week, and had two good runs. Tuesday it was 79 degrees and beautiful out. But it was so hot that my run ended up being really difficult, especially with the 7 minutes of hills. I realized that I need to start bringing a water bottle with me as I couldn't get to the water fountain fast enough on my return. Today's run was much better, we were supposed to have rain and high winds today, which I was not looking forward to, but most of that weather seems to have given us a miss this time. Most of my run was sunny and in the low 60s, which was perfect, and it was only right at the end that an approaching storm dropped a few drops on me. Needless to say, I haven't had a long run where I haven't been fighting a headwind in so long I had forgotten how great they are. I had no problem covering the 8 miles I had to do today, and was able to run a negative split for the first time in weeks. It felt really good and has given me a boost of confidence right when I needed it most. There was one fly in the ointment though, which was the swarms of mosquitoes I battled for some parts of the run, but this small nuisance did not overshadow the positive aspects. It struck me as well that the distance for today's "semi-long" run was the same as my long run from a couple of weeks back at the Aurora reservoir. It's nice to be able to see my improvement like that.