Experiment Complete and Insane Heat

Well-my experiment was to see if I could squeeze 12 weeks of training into slightly less than four weeks and the results are in: I can't. My 7-mile run times went from 1:11 to 1:08 to 1:04 in consecutive weeks, which is nothing to sneeze at, but which is also slightly worse than the per-mile time I ran in my last (13.1 mile) half marathon. That was two years ago, a week before my last Afton Trail Run, during which I had major cramp problems. It just doesn't seem like I'm on track to being able to do this race the way it needs to be done. Not totally closing the door yet-if I knocked another 3-4 minutes off that 7-mile pace in the next week...who knows...

Yesterday I took the day off and worked hard pretty much the whole day. It was 95 degrees, and I took on two of the hottest possible jobs I possibly could have. The first was lining the insulated interior walls of my attic with plastic sheeting. Later, I started a fire and burned all the extra woody plants, sticks, and old removed brush remnants that can't be composted. It burned huge & hot. It was so hot, in fact, that this morning when I removed the lid, there were still orange embers (about 16 hours after the snuffer had gone on).

Normally, we use sticks & stuff that fall from our trees as kindling in our patio fireplace, but we really had an excess of material here. Our two options were either to bundle it and have it out for trash day or to burn it. Here's a good question for the assembled: which is the more environmentally responsible alternative, burning sticks or having them go to a landfill?