WEEKLY SUMMARY (July 29-August 4): 45 miles (86% at E, 11% at T, and 3% at 5k paces)
  Sunday: off
  Monday: 8 miles at 7:39/mi.
  Tuesday: 3 miles easy, 2 x .75 mile at 5:47/mi. pace (.5 mile jog), 3.5 miles easy (9 miles total)
  Wednesday: 6 miles at 7:48/mi.
  Thursday: 3 miles easy, 5 x 1 mile at 6:25/mi. avg. (1 min. rest), 2 miles easy (10 miles total)
  Friday: 6 miles at 7:38/mi.
  Saturday: 6 miles 7:37/mi.

This was a planned low mileage recovery week in which I still did two (or one and a half) workouts at the usual intensity. I took Sunday off to kick the bug that plagued me the previous week, since I didn't need the miles this week, and it worked. For Tuesday's workout, I planned to do four intervals instead of just two. But I felt super strong, and it was clear that my speed was there now that I was back on flat terrain. So I decided on the spot to cut the workout short, since I didn't need a hard VO2 max workout during a recovery week anyway; and my schedule forced me to take only one easy day before the next workout, which was more important. Daniels says to do six 1-mile repeats at tempo pace for the workout I did on Thursday. As usual, I was pleased to get almost all the way through his scheduled workout. I didn't feel as strong as I did either on Tuesday or for the 2 x 2 mile tempo workout last week, but it went well enough. From the beginning it felt like I needed to run just a bit slower than my usual tempo pace of 6:20, but I was steady at that pace and remained so through the burning and heavy legs. I could have pushed through a sixth interval at close to 6:30 pace but saw no need to do so. The hard pushing will start soon enough. On Friday we flew back to the US shortly after my morning run, and I deliberately ran the same distance and pace back in DC on Saturday morning at roughly the same local time (6am) for the purpose of comparison. It was far from a scientific comparison, of course, since I spent most of the time between those two runs traveling and was not in anything like the same condition before my run on Saturday morning as I had been on Friday morning. Still, the experiment illustrated the effect of running in high humidity. The temperatures just after dawn in Athens and DC are similar at this time of year, but the late summer humidity in DC tends to be three or four times as high as it is in arid, almost desert-like Greece. Six miles is shorter than my usual easy run, so I wasn't very tired after either run. But I was much, much sweatier after running in DC on Saturday than I was after my run on Friday in Athens. I speculate that it is both because I sweat more in DC and because the sweat doesn't evaporate as quickly off my skin, which means that all the sweat does not actually help cool my body very much. This is just uncomfortable on a shorter run, but on a longer one it means that it is much more difficult in a humid climate both to avoid overheating and to replace the liquid and electrolytes lost through sweat. I often ran in temperatures this past month that were at least as hot as or hotter than those I would have experienced in DC (during what was apparently the hottest month on record), and certainly the terrain I ran on for much of the time was significantly hillier than one can find in DC. But heat and hills are much easier without this humidity. I have two weeks to acclimatize to it before my first marathon-pace tune-up race, which I'm starting to get excited about.