Doing the wave on a friendly Friday

Howdy neighbor!

Today's run (street): 4 miles
Tuesday's run (treadmill): 2.3 miles

In the scheme of things, adding a couple of miles to your weekly volume doesn't make a lot of difference. However, when you are only able to run three days a week, adding another workout day provides some psychological benefit. Or perhaps it lessens guilt. Same thing. So for the past two weeks, I've dutifully risen at 4:00 AM to up my weekly run count to four and get my mileage a little closer to where it used to be.

The rest of my week's running happens between Friday and Sunday and I kicked that off today with a 4 miler around the neighborhood. I work from home on Fridays and that saves time from my long commute. I try to get outside early so I can finish my run and start my business day at my usual time. Since I prefer early running, this works out fine. Today it worked out great.

I've written dozens of posts complaining about running the same streets of my neighborhood, day after day. I thought about that this morning as I covered a section that I've probably run more than 800 times over the past six years. But every one of those runs has differed in some aspect. There's always a story.

Getting out early provided great weather conditions with temperatures in the mid 60's and humidity at its lowest point in the day. As I ran, I noticed some people in business clothes walking out to their cars, ready to start their commute. Perhaps it was a TGIF mindset, but almost everyone waved or said good morning as I ran by. I crossed paths with a couple of runners and they gave friendly waves as well. Even people in cars waved as they passed. Lots of waving today.

That pleasantness carried over to my run. I felt good enough to push my pace and ended up averaging about 20 seconds per mile better than my current training pace. I had hopes that it would be even faster than that, but I'll take what I can get. As much as I enjoyed my friendly neighbors today, I'm looking to get away from my local roads over the weekend. The Bethpage trail would be an obvious choice but since I'm not planning to run Dirty Sock this year, I may go to Belmont Lake and run the course.