My favorite running club

From left: ER, SIOR, TPP

photo courtesy of the Petite Pacer

Today's run (Eisenhower Park): 6.1 miles

This morning I had the pleasure of running six miles with two great people who I've gotten to know through the running blog community. I joined the authors of She is Out Running (SIOR) and The Petite Pacer (TPP) at Eisenhower Park, under cloudy skies and light rain. I'm no fan of running in the rain, but I wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to spend time with these two fun people.

I'd met TPP in October at the Oyster Bay 5K and saw her again last Sunday at the Hope for Warriors 10K. Neither of us had met SIOR in person before today, so it was exciting to finally get together. You can tell a lot about a person by their blog, so I was not surprised to find them both to be fun, smart, thoughtful, interesting and kind.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time we set off on our run. TPP had suggested that we start at my pace and then switch it up to hers followed by SIOR's. Since the idea was to run together (I would have had trouble keeping up with them), we agreed that it was better to follow the most common denominator (me). We ended up running an overall pace that even I'd consider slow. But taking it easy helped us freely converse. And converse we did.

Eisenhower Park is under construction, so we needed to reverse direction once we reached a fenced off area. We ran the planned route backward and turned around at the southern side of the construction zone. Usually when I run six miles on my own, the tedium  starts early. I was genuinely shocked when I looked at my Garmin and saw that we'd covered 1.68 miles. At that point I was checking to see if we'd completed the first mile! Time (and distance) flies when you're having fun.

Today's route

We'd passed five miles as we grew close to the parking lot, but we wanted to keep going. We decided to take our second loop around the pond and then finished after either 6.12 or 6.19 miles, depending on if you believe my or TPP's GPS. My Garmin usually under counts by 2.5-3.5% so I'm guessing the actual distance was closer to 6.3 miles. Whatever it was, it seemed to go by faster than any six miles in recent history. That includes last week's 10K.

The icing on the cake was our post-run coffee at a nearby Starbucks, where we continued the conversation for another hour. I don't think any of us wanted to end our morning experience but the day's obligations required it. We agreed to try to do this again, perhaps on a regular schedule. That would be really great because this would be the first running club I'd actually want to join.