Sunday, July 12, 2009

Now These Long Runs are Getting Long

What was I thinking? That's what I kept on asking myself yesterday. Heaven knows I had enough time to answer. This is the part of marathoning that I don't really like. Long runs by myself. Hours spent on a trail alone. I'm spending a lot of time at long and medium long distances. I'm told that it will all pay off in the end, but for now it sure makes for a lot of reflective time.

With the weatherman calling for heat, I wanted to be done while it was still cool. 7:30 AM with the my Cal Coast club was *not* going to cut it. I ended up putting my 17 miles in by 9:30. Pace was slow at 11:15, but that included a couple of stops to fill up my water bottles and some time stopped to chat one of my Cal Coast/Runner's World buddies that I ran into on the trail. It's kind of neat to run into people I know out on a run!

On another note - I've been tagged by B.o.B of discom-bob-ulated Running. The challenge was simple - go to my first photo folder, select the 10th photo and tell a story.



I wish I had a pithy or funny story about this photo, but no such luck. This was taken at the Pediatric Cancer Research Fund's Cinco de Mayo Half Marathon. There wasn't a lot of fan support on the course, and about this point (10 miles in) I was in some pain and distress. These two folks were doing their best to cheer us on while sipping on their coffee and snapping a few pics.

And sorry - no family photos or embarrassing photos of me. Most of those are up on my Flickr site, or my older Fotki site. Feel free to bounce over and have a look. Warning - there are *a lot* of boring baseball photos.... So now it's time to pass the challenge on. Eenie, meenie, meinie, moe.... Patrick you're it!

9 comments:

  1. 11 minute miles is slow huh- if I knew you better I'd have to hurt you! ; - ) Gonna go check out your Flickr site.

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  2. I've done the photo thing before, and it was a photo of some job (building) my husband was working on. We share a computer, otherwise it would be mostly running pictures.

    Too bad you don't live closer because you could join our track club. With over 600 members in just their marathon training program alone, you'd never run alone again. :)

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  3. The pic is great. Doing runs for a good cause is the best thing a runner can do.

    Keep up the great runs!

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  4. I hate the long runs alone too but I bet your long runs are a lot longer than mine! hope you had a good weekend...hello monday : (

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  5. thanks for playing glenn! you gotta get someone to run with on those long runs. any running groups around?

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  6. You think 11:15 per mile is slow, that's much faster than my race pace :). Thanks for the advise Glenn by the way, it's the best one from many I've been getting to deal with the injury. Glad to hear you're doing good with your training.

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  7. nice job on the 17 miler. Believe me, I was in your place not to long ago and all the runs sort of just blend together. :)

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  8. nice job on the long run!! i am having a hard time getting out early to do them and end up having to deal with the heat (or you know, spend a couple hours on the 'mill). some days it's nice to have all that time to yourself/your thoughts, but some days it would be great to have some company. maybe you should have someone bike along with you with food/beverages :)

    love your blister-name idea, definitely lol'd at work!

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