Steve in a Speedo?! Gross!

A Gross PR: Highest Dew Point While Running

>> Monday, August 03, 2026

My last long run was HORRIBLE.

I came down stairs just before sunrise, and there was condensation on our front porch windows. I'd NEVER seen that before in the nearly 20 years we've lived in this house:

The dining room windows were COVERED too.

I knew it would be a thick run. And slow.

I opened the door and was SLAPPED with the humidity. I'd never felt that before. It was 6 a.m. and 80 degrees, with a "feel like" temp of 90 already THAT early in the morning:

I felt OK on my warm-up. Actually quite good. But I followed a set of foot prints for a MILE that were wet. If you walk through damp grass, you might leave a few foot prints. If you jumped in a pool fully clothed, you would leave a few more foot prints. But to leave a track for a mile means you are producing a lot of your own fluid! I hope this guy survived!

These 2 photos are about a half-mile apart!

I cut my run a little short (10 miles instead of 11.5, and only 4 harder miles instead of shooting for 5 [and normally doing 6]), and made a point to test myself mentally every now and then to make sure my brain was still functioning and it wasn’t crossing into a dangerous zone. (If my brain started to act up, would I still have enough brain power to recognize that my brain was acting up? That was my concern!) At mile 9 (which was 1 mile from home), I first started to get a little confused, and was glad I was nearly done. (I expected a major landmark on my normal long run route to be 0.05 miles BEFORE mile 9, but it was 0.05 miles AFTER, and I couldn’t figure it out until I was done running. ALL of my landmarks were after each mile after my turnaround on this run, but at mile 9, I got that mixed up and didn’t know what was happening.) Lost a few good brain cells that morning, but I survived.

I got home and saw the weather on the morning news: we nearly broke a dew point record that morning, with our dew point being 81° before sunrise. The all-time recorded high in Minnesota is a dew point of 82°.

For reference.

From the National Weather Service. WILD.

Here's where I took off my shorts:

I don't wish to do another run like that in a while...

p.s. Here's a post from 2 years ago talking about dew point vs humidity.

p.p.s. I've loosely started (specific) TC 10 Mile training, and this run was the first official run. Not a good start...

Interval Ride (on Detour)

>> Sunday, August 02, 2026

I posted about a detour on my tempo ride a few weeks back, and I headed back out on those smooth detour trails for some intervals 2 days after that tempo ride. I warmed up around home for a while, and then I did 4x5 mile intervals with about 3:00 easy riding in between.

It was a busy morning on the trail with a few BIG running groups out there. Like a hundred people split into smaller packs. It was WILD. I'd never come across something like that before on my rides. That made me adjust some of my rest times either getting up to speed a bit early, or waiting until getting past a big group before starting an interval.

My intervals were splits 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8:

East of split #8 is a freshly repaved trail, and I turned
around before it was the rough cruddy trail (at Randolph).

Here they are highlighted to see: in red, orange, green, and blue.

Yes, intervals #2 and #4 (the orange and the blue) were very similar on the map, but I was held up a BIT by big groups of runners in #2 (before they dispersed a bit for the day), and #4 didn't have me weaving under the 35E tunnel, so that's why #2 was my slowest and #4 was my fastest: