Extreme heat!

Today was set out to be a hard session and my big fears in the few hours before were that of the high temperatures, baking sun and lack of wind I would be running in. I tried to get well hydrated but by the time I had biked to Sharphaw I was feeling pretty dry in my mouth and thankfully had some Lucozade Sport to take on board. I was more concerned about whether I could get through a session as hard as I had planned in the conditions which were fit to laze around in, rather than run hill reps in. I jogged up to the gate where I would start the session and turned the Garmin on. This was where I met problem number one; the Garmin had very low battery and as a consequence only lasted 8 minutes into my first rep. I was really p****d off at this to be honest. I'd made the effort to get out and hadn't thought about putting the god dam thing on to charge and it was absolutley pivotal in this session. Fairly angry, I decided to call it a day at the first rep when it went off, so this was 2 minutes short off the intended 10 minutes, but the 8 minutes was at a good pace and I felt awesome. The descent down to the starting point was fast, back down the same way to try and get me used to turning at the top of races and adapt to downhill running after a lengthy ascent.
My next worry was how I was going to time the 3 minutes rest at the bottom, after descending fast back down the way I came up, over rocks, bracken, bogs and more! I just simply counted it in my head, and there was a gate a little short of where I reached on the first rep, and so decided to use this as the benchmark for the endpoint of the next 2 reps. To hazard a guess, I would say this gate is around 7 minutes running from the starting point, so short of the 10 but still a reasonable distance.
As the session went on, I felt to get a better rythm and particularly on the ascent, my legs felt to loosen up. The terrain today was steep gradients over rocky and boggy but grassy paths which were dry at times and therefore gave some fast running. The descending technique is obviously coming back to me, as part of this session was to descend fast and not use that as a rest. I felt much more confident than on the Club Run on Wednesday and wasn't worrying about going over on my ankles speaking of which has recovered very well.
Overall, this was a really solid hill session and despite not having any data (thanks Garmin!) and not reaching the full 10 mins for the 3 reps, I will have gained lots from today. I worked very hard and this was much better than the standard 'sprint up jog down' I'm accustomed to. Hopefully in the coming weeks, I won't be running in such extreme heat and I will manage to hit the reps at 10 mins each at the threshold pace I was at today!