Monday, May 30, 2011

May 29th - Ken Gar North - 9 miles - 2ish hours

On a hot holiday weekend I didn't expect too many folks to show up, but I guess everyone wanted to run off their Memorial Day meals early. I arrived around 6:40 and it was packed. I had enough time to use the bathroom (porta potties are starting to get that nice summer stank) and meet up with Coach Don who handed me an American flag bandanna.

We had a decent sized crew, though looking around we are probably one of if not the smallest pace groups. And all women, with the exception of Coaches Don and Mike. Poor guys, surrounded by an awful lot of estrogen for an awful lot of miles.

The route was north for 4.5 miles, it's not the hardest path on earth but it's tougher than south. Little hills add up after a while, especially on a hot morning. And as happens, at least with our group, we started to separate a bit. This is always tricky, and I don't envy the coaches. You want the group to stay together as much as possible but if someone's having a bad day there's no sense in beating them down during a training run.

Don hung with the back of the pack, Mike and Kathy moved up. At water stops we would hold up the front of the group until the rest of our runners caught up with us. We're still getting used to Coach Mike and he's getting used to us but I love the way he works. He's legitimately concerned about keeping us a group and if we can't all stay together then making sure subgroups have someone to keep them company. With Mike's leadership skills and Kathy's amazing ability to chat and keep us upbeat and Don's support we're unstoppable!

I lost some mileage when I forgot to restart my Gamin, I clocked 8.66 miles at a 12:44 pace. I know we picked it up a lot in the final charge home after the Silencer so I'm sure we did a little better than that. I clock all of the moving minutes, even if we're walking, but stop the watch when we hit the water fountains or red lights. Given the weather and attempts to keep our group together I think we did just fine. And we had fun, which is the most important part.

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