It's a little bit misleading to say that I ran 9 miles today. I "covered" 9 miles today...there, that's better. A friend of mine wants to start running, "from scratch", and so I'm helping her along, mostly in a motivating, "I'll be knocking on your door at 8, so you better be ready to hit the pavement" kind of way. Most of the run is still walking at this point, but I can see her improving already and soon we'll get to go for a run with a few walk breaks thrown in instead of a walk with some running here and there! I run to her house from mine, which is about 2 miles away, then we walk/run, then have a glass of water and a little chat then I run back home. There are several ways I can get to her house from mine. Some are slightly over 2 miles, some are slightly under 2 and I can never seem to remember which are which! So sometimes there's some zig-zagging or backtracking at the end of my run so I can get to a nice round number as far as mileage goes. Today I was 1.9 when I got to her house, 4 miles of run/walk (mostly walk... about 10 minutes of run, which is more than last week, so we're happy!), and 3.1 coming back. Not quite sure how I managed that! Anyway, tonight I think I might go make a second attempt at finding a running group that I know meets Tuesday and Thursday evenings as well as Sunday mornings in the next town over. I tried once before to meet up with them, and even though I was in the right place (they meet at a local gym and I checked with the girl at the desk) at the right time (I didn't want to get left behind, so I got there 30 minutes early, and I wanted to wait to make sure other people weren't just running late, so I stayed about 40 minutes after the meeting time!) but there wasn't a group of runners in sight! That was a few months ago and I'm ready to give it another try.
Edited to add: I found the running group! I was worried at first because I didn't see anyone with running shoes. The group meets at a gym and all I saw were soccer shoes and kids in their karate clothes. Finally I saw a guy who just had the "look" and what do you know... I must've had the "look" too, because before I was able to approach him, he came up and asked me if I was looking for the running group. There were 9 people including me tonight and they seem like a really nice group. We ran on paths through the forest and averaged 9:39 pace. I was getting a little bit nervous toward the end because it was getting dark and I could just imagine myself tripping over a root or running into a tree! Unless something comes up, I think I will try and make it on Thursday evening too. I'm so happy that I've finally found them! | 