The Sunny Side

Post 5k Sunset

Most social situations I enter are a product of coercion via email and relentless phone calls. The lastest conspirator was Andy Roberts.

I'm perfectly content with being a closet runner, I enjoy not knowing how slow I really am. On the bike my ego forces me to fake being fast when I need to, because I was briefly considered speedy years ago. The thing I love about running is that I'm pretty average and if I train very hard on a strict schedule I will still be average. I absolutely love that I'm never tempted to over extend myself and get a silly avoidable injury.

Now that I have a few years of uninterrupted running in my legs I'm a little more comfortable branching out and running with humans rather than with my bobcat and turkey friends. Despite my urge to run with people every once in a while, I'm not going to do anything about it. Here's where Andy comes in.

There's a fast 5k run every Thursday at the Miccosukee Greenway that Andy never misses, the group that forms this run has been meeting long enough that the starting line tree has died and been discarded by the park service. Each run is capped off with a splash of water to cool off and a large cooler of beer (water is optional). I know this sounds fun but getting crushed by runners spanning in age from 22 to late 50's and being the interloper in this tightly knit group is intimidating to me.

This week Andy finally talked me into running the hilly gauntlet of trails and grass. The one mile warmup was nice and easy, everybody chit chatted and poked fun of their friends and this helped settle my nervous stomach. Once we hit the starting line where the tree once stood the explosion of speed I was expecting never took place, in fact the acceleration happened so slow that I didn't realize that the top tier runners were way ahead of me until a minute or two later. To my surprise I was able to hang with a couple folks I knew despite running up a half mile grassy climb with the sun beating down. When we cut back in the woods I was still hanging on, oddly I would fall back on the descents and catch up on the climbs. On the final stretch I drifted off the back while my two pacers built up their gap during the steep up hill finish.

At the finish I was greeted by strangers smiling and shaking my hand. The fun conversations continued throughout our warm down back to the trailhead while I glowed in the satisfaction that I smashed my 5k PR. A half a beer later I was hanging out with a pile of new friends watching the sunset.