An Invitation to Run

I'm humbled by the outpouring of support of me for the death of my Brother Bob. I am surrounded by good people and it's times like these that prove that over and over again.

Since I don't have an office to go to, I've made it a point to get out and be social. One of the ways I'm doing that is accepting any invitation I get to run, ride or play in the ocean. Friday night I got an invitation to run on Saturday and didn't hesitate. Now it's important to understand where my running has been.

My longest run before Saturday was October 10th in Kona. I ran 47 minutes on that day and it was brutal. Nothing felt good. Between then and now I had built some consistency in my running. I ran all but 3 of those days because of travel. My longest and there was one was 30 minutes. All other runs were 10 minutes. As an example this week I ran 10 minutes 5 days in a row.

Saturday came along and I was not feeling like a long run would be a good idea. But I had committed so I showed up. We started running at an easy old man pace and really never got going. We were talking the entire time and at least for me, if I'm talking I'm not running real fast. We got to 40 minutes and my running partner said, let's make this 90 minutes. We'll go up this trail, turn at the parking lot and make a big loop back. It should be close to 90 minutes. The only problem is that we were talking the entire way. I believe we were on the topic of the women's race in Kona.

Daniela Ryf had an amazing rookie performance in Kona. She took the lead on the bike and held it for more than 20 miles on the run. She had 14 minutes on Marinda Carfrae at the start of the run. If but for one bad patch in the area of the Energy Lab she would have won the World Championships. That one bad patch allowed Rinny to do her magic and the rest is history. Well that's what we were talking about.

We missed a turn and ended up on a road neither of us knew. Being the runners that we are we decided to go forward rather than trace our way back. We found our way back to someplace we knew and continued on our way. The pace was now getting down right pedestrian, my fault totally. I started to feel every uneven step (we were running on wood chip horse trails) and I could feel my form tightening up. We got to the finish and we had run 1:53. A full hour more than anything I had run all month.

Every running expert in the world including me would tell you that's not a smart idea. Your long run should be around 30% of your total weekly running. You should increase your running by no more than 10% a week. You shouldn't run long when you are tired.

All of that is true but I believe when you get the invitation you go.

I did manage to run 10 minutes on Sunday. I was the shortest 10 minutes of the week.

It's a good life....