Summer makes a comeback.

It is humid, comrades. Very. Very. Humid.

It's fairly hot as well, what with this "temperatures over 90" business that's been going on for the past couple of days. I thought we were past all this, but no. September lives to spite me with its early-June-like weather.

There are two things that will kill a run faster than anything else: hills and humidity.

Hills can be conquered; the track where I run is, indeed, fairly hilly. Whip around that sucker a few times a week for three years or so and you'll learn to scoff at hills (not that I have, necessarily, but I can see how runners of the non-mediocre variety might).

Humidity, on the other hand, is a universal killer. It sucks the life out of you. The moisture in the air congeals to form a formidable wall of resistance...it pushes against you with every step...you can't keep going...you know you can do better...but you can't breathe...

OK, it's (maybe) not that bad. I wanted you to feel sorry for me because I'm still kinda sick and it was the first day back at work after a long weekend and I was tired and wah, I really, really, really didn't want to run today.

But I did.

And it was HUMID. Despite all the hyperbolizing above, it is unequivocally true that humidity is the worst thing that can happen to a run. The. Worst. Actually, now that I think about it, there was very little hyperbolizing going on there. I speak the truth. And the southwest corner of Tennessee can generate a high air-moisture content with the best of them.

It's rarely a good sign when the sky starts spontaneously drooling raindrops, as was the case shortly before I ran.

On account of the weather not being ideal and me really not being into this today, I thought I'd mix it up a bit and try running my two miles super-fast, because people who know about such things say it's good to add in a bit of speed training every now and again.

My first mile went very nicely; I floated through it in 10:14. I felt quite good about that. Unfortunately, one mile was about all I had in me tonight, so the entire second mile was laborious and torturous and lots of other wince-inducing words that end in -ous (superfluous?). Mile 2 came in at 10:52, which is still faster than I usually run, but a more...er...better effort on my part would have had those two times reversed.

And then when it was all over, my legs about gave out on me and I wouldn't have fought a black-out, had one crept up on me. But I wasn't all that out of breath or anything, so I'm guessing that was just my sinus infection.