Birthday Run

Monday was Arland's 29th ;) birthday, he was going to take the day off but ended up working from home instead. I had ordered him a really nice Pearl Izumi cycling jacket hoping he would be able to wear it on the planned group bike ride Monday morning. I guess it was a good thing he had to work since his jacket didn't arrive until yesterday. It is really nice, and looks good on him, I hope he gets to test it out soon!

After our run on Sunday Kelly and I both said we were going to take Monday off we needed to rest up for our Hill Repeat workout on Tuesday night.
Even Monday morning I thought for just a little while I might really take the day off... but of course I didn't... I ran and I am so glad I did!!!
It was a great run both physically and mentally. After a really tough long run I sometimes lose confidence in myself and I need these Monday and Wednesday night runs with Brenda and the others to help me regain that lost confidence.
We talked Arland into running with us. At first he was a little resistent he knows we usually run 6 and he had 2 planned. I told him that if he could run 2 he could run 3 and that it wouldn't be a problem at all for us to alter our route to accomodate his mileage needs.
Michele is still recovering from the calf pain that caused her to almost quit at mile 3 on Saturday, she is taking this week off to let it rest and hopefully prevent a serious injury from occuring.
Kelly got out of work late and needed to run some errands with her daughter and Robert was "Refing" a Basketball game.
So it was just me Brenda and Arland and we had a great run. Arland was impressed with all of our "hills" and he didn't even see all of them. As usual the first couple of miles were a little tough but we kept telling ourselves we were taking it easy we wanted to get a run in but we also wanted to be ready for Tuesday night.
Arland looked really strong and powered up all the hills... he would pass me and Brenda on every one of them. You would never know to look at him that he had to take almost 2 months off because of a stress fracture in his leg.
When we got back to Michele's house we were at 3.4 miles, Arland decided to run the cul de sac with us to make it 3.5 plus a cool down walk.
Brenda and I said our good bye's and went off in Michele's neighborhood to finish up our 2.5 miles. I think we had just passed the 5 mile mark when I felt the first raindrops... We didn't even know there was a chance of rain. We kept on running ,of course we didnt' have much choice we were about a 1/2 mile from Michele's house, we decided to run loops around the Cul de sac to finish up our 6 miles, we wanted to finish but we didn't want to get too far away incase it started pouring down. It was a pretty steady rain but it didn't bother us, it actually felt kind of good. It was around 39 degrees monday night so you wouldn't think rain would feel good, but because we didnt' have any wind we had gotten pretty warm during our run.
We were able to get a short cool down walk and then jumped in our cars. Usually we will stretch and cool down but not with the rain!
6 miles
1:02:11
10:22 Avg pace
1-10:20
2-10:20
3-10:48 quick walk break
4-10:06
5-10:13
6-10:20