One of the things I miss most about college are the Sunday runs. Sunday was always my favorite day.
During the week, we would tend to run four to seven miles at six in the morning, and then seven to twelve at four in the afternoon. On Saturday’s we would race. Sunday was when we did our long runs. Thirteen to nineteen miles at whatever pace we wanted, which was usually a pretty quick pace. Certainly faster than was actually good for us. Those runs were a lot of fun though.
The last few years I had Sunday runs most weeks, interupted mostly by my races since now the majority of them fall on Sundays. The unfortunate part of it, though, was that anybody running the quick pace that was like what I did in college would never be there for more than one week in a row and there was never more than one or two others. A few times, such as when I was preparing for the Mystic Places Marathon, I would hook up with some random people out running and get that pace with them.
This year is a little different. I have joined a new team, populated with runners who are for the most part more talented than me and tend to find the time to work a lot hard than me. Running with them is like being in college again, except that these guys are twice the age that we were back then. The paces are not much different, though.
This morning I got a good Sunday run in. We went out for a good 12+ miler, I got to explore some new ground in a town that I haven’t done a lot of running in (with the added incentive of not knowing the easiest way back to my vehicle if I fell behind…) and the weather made for a great run. I managed to keep pace fine for about 65 minutes, but since we were running faster than I ran my marathon two weeks ago my legs weren’t quite up to keeping that pace. Of course, about a mile later I saw a familiar mop of hair so I picked it up to catch up to my teammates about the time they were passing another friend of mine, so I ran a mile or so with him and then was back to where I began.
Sunday runs are still a lot of fun.
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