Start time: 11/21/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria
Distance: 5.4 miles
Average pace: 9:29min/mile

This is the second time I’ve run the Pacers Alexandria Tuesday route, and we actually ended up a tiny bit faster (40 seconds), which considering that I’d changed my GPS so that it no longer pauses when I stop moving (as happens when running up and down King Street waiting for cars to go by) is impressive. My last hill work pre-marathon, and it felt effortless. (Really consistant, too.) Amusement for the evening was watching Darryl deliberately leap and roll in a massive pile of leaves along the course… and then later on finding bits of branch trapped in his shoe. Hmmm, wonder how that got in there?

If I’ve got everything else ready I might try and do a slow 3-miler Thursday morning, we’ll see.

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=510272

Start time: 11/09/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria
Distance: 5.25 miles
Average pace: 9:05min/mile

Oopsie… I forgot to turn on my GPS when I went running with the Pacers group tonight. Fortunately Darryl turned on his stopwatch, though. A good run, all in all.

Start time: 10/24/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria
Distance: 5.4 miles
Average pace: 9:38min/mile

I decided to give the Pacers Alexandria Tuesday run a whirl—it was an interesting route, through a lot of neighborhoods, and this was a lot of learning the route and following other people. One slow big hill, so not quite as tough as the normal Tuesday route I hit. Still, it was nice to see a change of pace.

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=510272

Start time: 10/05/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria
Distance: 5.5 miles
Average pace: 8:54min/mile

Tonight was another new course; now that it’s getting darker out, it’s not safe to run the other course on Thursdays so this new one sent us through Old Town Alexandria, as well as some industrial sort of wasteland along Eisenhower Avenue. Only the the thing is… we weren’t sure where we were supposed to turn around. We were told the course was five miles, and given a landmark… but where was it?

When we finally did hit it, we turned around and decided to come back on the other side of Eisenhower Ave. Only there wasn’t sidewalk for a stretch of the highway. And oh yeah, a big metal fence along the edge of the road. And an 18-wheeler heading right for us. Whoops! (Don’t worry, we survived thanks to hugging the fence.) Turns out it was actually 5.5 miles, not too shabby.

Afterwards I pitied any future boyfriends I may have; I was humming as I put dinner in the oven, and outright singing by the time I got into the shower. After a good run? Top of the world, no doubt about that.

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=477958

Start time: 09/21/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria and the Mount Vernon Trail
Distance: 5.1 miles
Average pace: 8:36min/mile

Tonight was the last run on the Pacers Alexandria course we’ve been running on Thursdays—with it getting dark earlier it’s dangerous to use the trail much later. So it was a fond, but fast, farewell to the course. I’ll miss next Thursday’s run (book club!) but I guess on October 5th I’ll see what the new course is like. Here’s hoping for flat, flat, flat!

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=389088

Start time: 09/07/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria and the Mount Vernon Trail
Distance: 5.1 miles
Average pace: 8:34min/mile

First, the running stuff. I skipped Tuesday’s run (tummy troubles), so I was eager to get back out on the trail today. We took our first mile a little fast at 8:18 (sorry guys!), so after that I moved to the back of the group and even after slowing down a bit in mile 2 to try and keep everyone from keeling over, we still knocked out the rest at a pretty fast pace (8:58, 8:38, 8:42, 8:31). Phew. (But kicking butt!)

While we were out running, one of the other regulars (whom we’ll call TM) was out in front of us. He’s a (former, I think) marine who usually runs in front of us a little bit, and we often catch him at which point he’ll sprint ahead a bit more. Runs by himself, with headphones on… I’m not entirely sure why he shows up to group runs. Anyway, we caught him with about a mile to go this evening and he couldn’t go any faster so he ran with us for a little bit. Darrell was singing silly songs so TM offered up some cadence. Darrell instantly began to warp the responses (which was pretty funny), and TM seemed a little frustrated but struggled on. TM’s cadence had to do with beating up Superman and marrying Lois Lane, and then all of the sudden this charmer of a couplet came out: “Nine months later we had a baby / He was a fag so he joined the Navy.”

An instant silence fell over the group (we were stopped waiting for a street light to change) and I must have given him a look. Before I could say anything else, the light switched, and the group ran on and left TM behind. Afterwards, we were at the running store getting water and I was about to walk back outside when he came in and walked over to me. “I hope you’re not Navy,” he said, “I didn’t mean to offend anyone.”

“Oh no,” I replied, looking down at him*. “But I’ve slept with enough military men that I understand.” He gave a sort of chuckle and I kept walking outside. I’m not sure if it sunk in or not (and I could’ve been more direct but I was tired and sweaty and am happy I at least fired that one off at him—a blatant lie, I might add, but he doesn’t need to know that) but I’m sure sooner or later it will.

We’ll see if he tries to run with us again!

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=389088

* — I say looking down at him because TM is easily under five feet tall. An unnecessary detail but I can be snappish when I want to.

Start time: 08/24/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria and the Mount Vernon Trail
Distance: 5.1 miles
Average pace: 8:42min/mile

No, that’s not a typo. It was back to the “old” course (which I’d only done once before) with the Pacers Alexandria group, and Sonia was leading the “9-to-9:30-group.” Well, it was her birthday and she was definitely proving that aging does not make you slower! I’m not complaining, I really enjoyed the workout despite the fact that it made me even sweatier than normal. On the way out we kept feeling hot winds blowing off the Potomac River and we kept thinking a storm was en route. By the end, I certainly looked like I’d been hit by a rainstorm, but no… it was just my body being disgusting as always. (The subject line being the answer to the rhetorical question I wanted to ask as to where the storm went.)

It was a great run, though. We got hit by one or two lights on the way back and I thought I was losing my momentum each time, but it was all good. (9:02, 8:38, 8:36, 8:45, 8:36, and (not even sure why I’m recording this) a 7:25avg for the .1 miles at the end. Too silly!) I feel really good for this Sunday’s 14-miler, hopefully I’ll have someone to run it with. Chris S said he’s going to probably come out and run 4 miles of it with me before turning around, so that’s better than nothing. I’m going to see if I can get Chris McC (provided he’s all healed up) to see how he feels about slumming at my pace and distance for Sunday. Since he’s been sidelined for a bit, I’m thinking it may have a bit of allure to it…

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=389088

Oh yeah, and afterwards a bunch of us went to Tiffany Tavern down King Street and got a beer. Woohoo! Carb up!

Start time: 07/13/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria and the Mount Vernon Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Average pace: 9:24min/mile . . . sort of

When I got ready to leave my apartment today to (finally) try out the Old Town Alexandria location of Pacers’s group runs, I thought to myself, “It seems kind of nice outside. I won’t dig out the sleeveless shirt.” And then I also left the half-frozen bottle of water, thinking that yeah, it wasn’t that hot… right?

Ooooof. What was I thinking? Super hot, super humid. On the bright side, I kept a pretty good pace going with Chris. Technically I didn’t really get that pace; Chris, two other runners, and I stopped at the halfway point to refill our water bottles for about two minutes, and on the way back we missed two lights and were stuck for another three and a half minutes. So to be fair, those rest stops helped out a lot. And if I add back in all that time elapsed it’s really a 10:30min/mile pace. But it felt good to look at the little chart I downloaded off the Garmin and know that once I took out those points, I actually did a good job of maintaining a steady pace. Yay!

Looking quite forward to Sunday morning!