Never Enough T-Shirts

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.

Another misleading mileage report! Ran 4 and mostly walked 5.75

My friend is doing pretty well with her new running routine. This was our 4th time going out, and she ran 3 minutes more than yesterday...and probably 9 or 10 minutes more than our first time last week! I ran to her house and was running late, so you know what that means...had to run faster! I took a route that was pretty close to exactly 2 miles and the time for the 2nd mile was 8:15! We walked for about 10 minutes before starting to run a little bit every other "lap". We just kept going around and around the AF base housing in our town (even though the base is 20 minutes away!) There's not much traffic (vehicles or pedestrians) and I think my friend likes doing laps because she can tell if she ran farther than the time before. Ordinarily, this would be really boring, but she's easy to talk to, so I barely noticed that walking around in half-mile circles for over an hour! 

Stopped for a glass of water and a long chat at her house, then ran the last 2 miles home.

Tomorrow night is the next meeting of the running group. On Thursdays they do some kind of repeats/hills/intervals and I haven't done any of that in a loooong time, so I'm still debating whether or not to go. Especially because most of the people that were at the group yesterday won't be there as they're running a half-marathon in France on the weekend. But I think I should probably just go for it!

Another run that ended up a bit longer than anticipated, thanks to my lack of directional skills! 

I was going to go out for 3 on Saturday afternoon, but tried a "new way" home. I was right near my house, but there was a lot of traffic and I'm just not confident crossing the street at round-abouts when there's a lot of traffic, so I went a different way and ended up wandering around a neighborhood I hadn't been in before! Oh well!