Drowning in hot lava

I've just discovered that I don't have to train for something all the time.
And since I'm not, and since it's about a billion degrees out and churning out my morning 3 or 5 miles feels like drowning in hot lava, I've been taking a break.
Either no running, short running, or nothing at all for a few weeks, then I'll gear up to get ready for the fall (fall should be here sometime in late November...).
Now that my hips are all old and decrepit, I think I have to be pretty choosy about races and miles and training plans. In the interest of keeping my hips as long as possible, I'm trying out a new strategy: breaks after races. After four on the fourth, I realized that I was just sweating and plowing through humid air in the morning, and with no real goal. So I backed off for awhile. I am sometimes too lazy to go to the gym, so I did a few short runs on those days, but otherwise I've spent the last few weeks doing strength and cross-training.
If this goes well, then in the future I'll maybe intersperse training for a specific race with periods of non-running cross training to reduce the wear and tear on my hips. But that's just speculation for now: I might find out that it's hard to ramp back up, or that it makes me MORE injury prone. So we shall see over the next few weeks. It's an experiment!