Running with Chuck

Doesn't that sound like a title to a book? It does to me. Anyway, it is Friday so that means that I meet Chuck for a run. We have been meeting at 7 am but circumstances changed a bit so I met him at 8:15 this morning. On the schedule was fartleks.

My shins have started to feel tender, which I think is the beginning of shin splints. After describing it to Chuck, he agreed that it was the beginning of shin splints. I have been icing so he wants me to ice twice a day if possible. It is not full blown pain but it is tender..more so after I run.

Chuck also said in looking at the schedule that he had not factored in a rest run so instead of doing fartleks, we were going to do an easy 4 miles on the track. He also said he just realized that we still have more than 2 months left to the Half so we are going to not add more milage to our long run for a few weeks. He is considering doing just a very easy 6-7 miles this week rather than the 11-12 we were going to. Yay! Don't get me wrong, I would do the 11-12 but boy, that 6-7 sounds so nice.

I don't like track running, it is just repetitive and boring. Running the track with Chuck makes it go by a lot faster. We have all kinds of interesting conversations as we run.

This morning, some of the topics we covered were (not in this order): elite runners, garmins, interracial dating, the "newbies ruining marathons" article, stupid games that runners come up with, streetlights going out, a coaching conference he went to recently, the descrepency between how mens pants are sized vs how women's are sized, the History Channel, MSN on the internet, solo running and flogging (this was after we talked about the movie Passion of the Christ) Yeah, it is a big mix but when we talked, it really did have logical ways we went from one topic to another. You just never know what we are going to discuss. We spent a warm up run once talking about George and Martha Washington!

It was a nice, easy run today. We did 4.31 miles in 47:49. This means I averaged an 11:05 pace..how in the world did I do that? I thought we ran a very relaxed, easy pace. Wait, we did. That just means that I am getting a wee bit faster.