Lost

This week's long run was  six miles, the crown jewel of an "easy" week, built into the training schedule to allow me to rest and prevent injuries over the course of the next 12 weeks.

I thought it would be a great time for my husband and I to run with Justin Sternberg, a special projects producer at the station -- a guy who is among the seriously fast. I've called him Mr Ironman under my breath a few times. He just completed a half marathon over the weekend. I ate macaroons over the weekend. (Well, okay, I also ran five miles on Sunday.)

Justin wants to do the Houston Marathon in 3 hours and 10 minutes. If I have a good day, I theoretically can do the race in 3 hours 36 minutes. My husband, training for his first marathon, hopes to run it in four hours. And I figure if we have a shot at making time, we need to run hard.

That's where Justin comes in. Logging some miles with faster runners is always a way to get pushed when you can't push yourself hard enough.

Friday we met up with him - and he was off and running from the station at a 7:36 minutes/mile pace, if I remember correctly. We kept up this pace through West University Place and onto the dirt path around Rice University. I thought things were going pretty well until the 3 mile mark, when I ran into, shall we say delicately, phlegm issues. I had to stop to deal with it.

My husband and Justin kept running.

I didn't think this was a big deal, figuring I'd catch up or they'd stop and wait at some point. Problem was, I'd never run around Rice before and so when the dirt path kept going, so did I. All the way to Bissonnet. Which was definitely no longer Rice and definitely not where my husband and Justin went. I ran up Bissonnet a little ways and then cut back to the university, where I ran around to University, hoping to catch up with those guys.By that time, I had logged an extra mile. I didn't see them, so I kept going down University, past Kirby, turning on Belmont (I think) to Bissonnet and down a block to the station. My husband was waiting.

"We figured you got lost!" he said. They'd run the entire six miles at an average 7:39 minutes/mile pace. Me... well I'd slowed down when they weren't around to drive me (remember, this was WHY I wanted to run with Justin in the first place) and then my Garmin did something strange and reset itself so that it didn't auto pause when I stopped (like say, for traffic crossings) and it didn't auto lap, giving me a split for each mile.

I'd be willing to bet I did the first three miles at a 7:36 - 7:39 pace though. At least I got seven miles out of my little detour.