April 9, 2012

Runday Monday: Three's Company

I ran the Tely Teaser on Good Friday morning. It was my first time partaking in the annual event where a large group of runners run the Tely 10 route to kick off the Easter Weekend. Sixteen kilometres was on my half marathon training plan for the weekend so the event presented a good opportunity to get the run done before the chocolate fest began.

Unlike my usual solo-long running, I met up with a couple of girlfriends for the run. One of the girls is training for a marathon so she ran 7km before meeting up with me near the start of the race and the other is training for a half marathon a bit after mine so she joined us at the 6km point. Together we clocked off the 10 miles lickety split. We enjoyed lots of great conversation, shared parenting tips and woes, and kept each other motivated. I have to say, the company made the run fly by. I usually find the latter part of the long runs tiresome, but it was no time and we were rounding the corner into Bannerman Park.

I actually forgot how much I enjoy running company. My husband and I often ran together before Hudson P came along. We even did trained and ran the Tely 10 together in 2008. Unfortunately, that routine had to shift now that we have Hudson P, with one of us tending to him while the other runs. I'd gotten used to running solo with only my iShuffle for company and have clocked all my half training runs alone since January. Truth be told, I was a little uncertain about the joint run on Friday as I'm no longer used to running side by side.

I had nothing to worry about though. We shared a similar pace and made decent time. Sharing the run in the sun with friends made the whole run faster and way more fun. I'm hoping to join up with them again over for long runs between now and the half marathon in May. In fact, the thought of having company makes me look forward to running 18 and 19km runs in the next few weeks. Turns out three's company after all.

image source: tvlistings.zap2it.com

1 comment:

Jennifer Wellsman said...

Colleen, I thoroughly enjoyed our run on Friday and I admit, I was also a little concerned about running with two more seasoned runners. But, as you say, our paces are very similar and the run went by very fast. I too look forward to the longer runs as the weeks go by.