What ever it takes!

I've been doing conferences for Intel about 6 years now, and every time people say "you should run with Joe" I've e-mailed 'Joe' before but we never hooked up and actually ran.  Well, on Saturday I met Joe for the first time and we decided to meet for a run this morning. Joe English is his full name and he's a pretty good runner, he even has an online training site running-advice.com  just going off marathon times we figured we were pretty equivilent runners, although he has a lot more experience than me. 

He's in the nice hotel, instead of the Vendor hotel where I stay so I met him at his at 6:00, we ran to the park.  We got to the park and he said "lets do some speed work" Umm!  OK, really who goes running with someone they just barely met and says lets do speed work?  He wanted to do 2 sets of the 3K course, I told him I didn't really want to go faster than 6:00 pace, he said that was OK for the first lap and took off, I stayed with him but at the .5K mark I looked down and my Garmin said 5:22 pace, I said, or we could do 5:20 pace if you want.  He slowed down to around 5:50, I stayed with him until 2K then he slowly got away.  He waited for me, maybe 30 seconds at the finish line, we jogged to the start again and he said he was going to do the next loop faster, I told him he'd be going alone :)  I went out at about 6:00 pace, stayed there until my foot started hurting and then slowed to 6:40 pace to finish.  It was really fun to find someone to run with, hopefully he doesn't do speed work everyday, I think it was probably good for me to do a shorter run with speed this week, I would have just ran easy all week if someone wasn't pushing me.

Go figure, I stop running as much and I start getting more injured.  The heel of my right foot was really bothering me all night and this morning, so I just did the elliptical for 30 minutes.  I'm done with China and want to go home, it's going to be hard to get on a plane to go to Boston.

I've been very lucky this trip with beautiful weather, normally is smoggy and gross the whole time but it was been great this week.  We had an early start so I had to get out at 5:00am to go run, it's already starting to get light here at 5:00 awesome, they must not do daylight savings time. My hamstring is almost a none issue but my stupid heel really started bothering me out of now where.  It took about a mile to get going but I felt really good and refreshed after that, and now my heel even feels better than before the run.

Last day in China, conference is done today and I fly home first thing tomorrow morning.  Easy loop around forest park, the foot felt better but still hurts.

Can't wait to go home.

It's official, I'm insane.  I agreed to help put on the 1st annual Traverse Mountain 5K.  The Principals crazy idea to have all 899 students run a 5K.  I started the planning last October, put the website together, had an online registration form and everything.  Unfortunately I was the only one thinking that far ahead, everyone else started their planning about 3 weeks ago.  Anyway, I really don't want to go into a long story, I flew back from China this morning, rushed home from the airport, went an marked the course with Allie and Carina,  I had allie pace the Kindergarten and 1st Graders, Carina paced the 2nd and 3rd Graders and I paced the 4th, 5th, and 6th grader.  2 4th graders had the best overall times at around 23:30 with me.  Carina had a 3rd grader come in at 23:50.  Don't know what's wrong with those lazy 5th and 6th Graders.

The race went very well considering how hard it is to just organize 3 kids, let alone 900.  I only got yelled at by a couple of parents who think their kids should have won.

Now I head off to Boston tomorrow morning,  I really don't think I'm setting myself up well for a good race on Monday.

5 nice miles on the trail before flying to Boston. Now I'm hanging out with a bunch of guys who are way faster than me.