Rain Shmain

By way of background.....after Tisha b'Av services on Wednesday night, a friend tells me that some who used to live in our community but moved to Sharon, MA about 7 years will be in for a weekend visit and needs to run 14 miles. He's training for the Bay State Marathon on October 18. I told my friend, sure I'll run with him, no problem.  Honestly, I was a little nervous since I'm not currently trained for that distance. My longest run since the NJ Marathon was 10.5 mi which I ran about 3 weeks ago.

Fast forward to Sunday....we met at our meeting place at 6:30 and were met with a light drizzle. About 3 miles in the drizzle stopped and the humidity was back. I try to find company for my long runs but I usually find myself running solo. Having a buddy who runs the same pace as me was quite a treat. The miles seemed to fly by until....the skies opened up. For the first 9 miles we were able to maintain a 8:30 average pace. At mile 10, I started to feel the effects of not being trained for the distance. We slowed out pace finishing mile 10 in 8:51 and mile 11 in 8:53. Somehow we found the where-with-all to finish mile 12 in 8:30. During mile 13, we both had to take a short walk break. After that we slowed our pace finishing mile 13 in 9:38.  Finally just past mile 13 we stopped at an intersection and I just couldn't get my legs going again.We decided to call it quits at 13.44 miles. We enjoyed a refreshing walk home in the rain.

This run reminded me of a conversation a I had with Brandon before the Achilles Hope and Possibility 5 Mile
 at the end of June. We talked about collective training and how we could run distances we may not be trained for at the moment.  Sunday's run is, without question, one of those runs where collective training came into play. I was able to run 13.44 miles despite doing only 1 double digit run since the NJ Marathon.

Later in the day we celebrated our daughter's 8th birthday at the local bowling alley with 12 of her closest friends. I had no qualms partaking in a few slices of pizza and a nice big piece of Carvel Ice Cream Cake.