Running With A Friend, and Some Other Things

I went running last night with my friend Michelle, my real-life inspiration for all this perspiration. It was the first time I have been running with someone else, apart from the clinic. It was easier than running alone; the time goes a little faster. We chatted about this and that and she gave me some hard won running tips. (Breathing is good!) She is training for a half-marathon which means she runs for, like, multiple hours at a time, and is doing hill training and real athletic things like that. That's so cool!

Since I was running with company (company, moreover, with a fancy interval-timing watch) I decided to try three-and-ones for the first time. The first set was fairly hard but we slowed down a little and the rest were quite doable, if a smidgen on the long side.

Running with someone was fun, but running alone is nice, too — it's good to have some time alone with myself. I think it will be less pleasant as I increase my running time; I imagine it will be harder work and I will find it more difficult to keep my mind off the pain, or maybe the boredom. Perhaps that is when I will treat myself to an iPod.

I'm back in a Learn To Run clinic again; last Saturday was the first meeting. Obviously, since I attended the first two weeks of the last clinic before my injured knee forced me to drop out, it was all familiar material. The run portion was a cakewalk for me since it was two minutes walking, one minute running, although we were running a little faster than I have been. I hit it off with another girl and we ran quite far behind everyone else. She was embarrassed but I didn't care; better to run slow and keep running than to run fast, save face, and hurt yourself.