Unintentionally Badd

This has been a strange week for my running. On multiple occasions I unintentionally ran either further or harder than I had expected.

On Tuesday I had decided to run before work at the Germantown store. At first everything went according to plan. I ran down Germantown Parkway, into Shelby Farms and completed the Tour D' Wolf trail loop. Upon my return I encountered Eric Butze about to start his run from the Wolf River Trail head close to our store. Of course I agreed to run with him for a while. Six miles later I realized that I had completed my long run for the week. It was about 14 miles total. It was a nice run. The weather was good and Eric has one of those global positioning systems so the pace is always honest.

Thursday I was a little sore from my previous runs this week and wasn't feeling too good. I decided in the morning to take it easy at Breakaway's midtown group run that night. Once again Butze would change my plans. As the time approached for the group to begin, none of the usual horses showed up to pace Eric on his tempo run and was looking quite sullen. In the end I committed to running with Butze again as long as we started off easy. We ended up negative splitting the loop with our first hard mile at 6: 15 and our last around 5:40. All in all a pretty good effort.

I would say that my next run will definitely be easy, but who knows these days. Fit Happens!

Bryan

Running and Rowing

What a night - who could have expected that we would have so much fun with a run and a row? Sarah has picked up rowing on the rivers around the Norfolkarea and is now officially in a rowing club. She's still learning and tonight was her first time "skulling" in this particular kind of boat by herself. Intense! But "she's a natural" as Debbie, her coach in the "launch" says to me as wedrift down the river so she can coach Sarah and two other new rowers. Pretty awesome.

So Sarah and I had this idea that I would run with her while she biked to go row tonight - we were going to do it a few days ago but the idea fell through. I would get there and read or something, maybe take a few

pics, and she would row, then we'd go home the same way we got there. Well I had no idea I would end up getting the amazing privilege of riding in the "launch" or the

boat that the coach rides in while the rowers do their thing.

So I ran and Sarah biked three point four miles to her rowing spot and then I got to go with them! Sweet. He

e's a pic from inside the boat so you can see how close we were most of the time, although we had to leave and go coach the other rowers too - sad. I got to thinking on the run home how cool it would be if there as some way that a coach could get runners early enough and drive in front of them (maybe with a golf cart of something - someone else driving so they could watch), and they could shout directions the way Coach

Debbie was tonight! Man, that would be something. "Relax! Swing your arms up higher and extend your stride a little bit. Bend your knees more." But instead we are so engrossed by our form when we finally get to a coach who can correct us that it might be damn near impossible to change.

Ok, one more picture, and then a run home!

Old Dominion Run

As I previously admitted the runs have not been happening as often as I would have liked for the past two weeks, maybe three... This morning I woke up and then went back to sleep knowing that I could easily work a run into my schedule later in the day. Well this time I made true to my own promise and got my run in - thankfully. A nice little 5 mile run through the neighborhoods behind the university - most of which are quite nice. I'm trying something new in my post - the map of my run. Not only will this help to show what I have done, if anyone is that morbidly interested in running that they look at it, but it will help me catalogue my runs so I can go back to ones I like. Or if it's a great one, you can do it if you ever get in that area!

Click on this to see the run! (Oh, and you will notice that this run starts at the Baptist Student Union - which is now called the Baptist Collegiate Ministry - but how cool is it that we are on the map!)

I hope to keep this tool for my runs that I post on here and suggest that Bryan should do it too! If you would like to post your own favorite runs go for it. Especially if you would like to map it out for us so we can all see. I think my next post will include one or two of my favorite Memphis runs!