16 miles with a time trial today. I couldn't make it to the AFC Half Marathon in San Diego and with a lack of summer races in the Phoenix area I wanted to see where my fitness was at. I met my coach John and my buddy Ricardo. John was awesome to come out and hand us bottle every couple miles. The plan was to warm up four miles then do a 10 mile time trial on a slightly down hill course to negate the heat. The 10 miles has a close to 300 ft drop with a couple of small and not very steep up hill portions. Today turned out to be extremely hot with medium humidity. It was 90 when we started out at 5 am with a dew point of 55 (145 misery index). The plan was to run around 5:45 pace so we decided we would start closer to 6 minute miles in the beginning to ease into it and see how the heat felt. That never happened at we paid for it! Ricardo dropped at 6 miles and I ended up dropping at 8.57 (49:35 total/5:47 pace) . I was fading badly and I figured it would be smarter to pull the plug and save my body rather than shuffle in at 6:15 pace and say I didn't quit. It was just too hot for me to run 10 miles at that pace. I'm actually relatively happy given the heat. It's hard to judge exactly how this went with a downhill course and excessive heat but I think it reflects my LT pace to be around 5:45 in normal summer conditions. That's about what I thought. Splits were 5:49, 5:42, 5:41, 5:42, 5:46, 5:44, 5:50, 5:50, 6:03 pace (.57). I ran a couple of miles afterward for a cooldown. Fitness isn't great but is improving. | 