My friend from the acting world, Elizabeth Corkum, called me up the other day expressing an interest in running in Central Park together this weekend. We’d talked about this before, but it finally was going to happen!
And it couldn’t have happened in a nicer clime. Not a cloud in the sky showed up for our run. It was 41 degrees and a lot of people were already in the park by the time we hit it around 10:30am. Elizabeth is pretty in-shape and she was a great running partner, especially at so early in my return to running. She was a stride ahead of me throughout much the first half of the run. She had a great pace herself (8:08s) and she’s going to get better and faster as she trains.
Myself, I was on the slow side, though I already improved my time from the run two days ago (8:06s today as opposed to 8:13s over a shorter distance two days ago). I was really having a tough time talking and running in the beginning of the run, but my breathing calmed down later in the run.
When we started off, we were kinda headed toward taking the 102nd St. Transverse to do 5.4 miles, but I left it up to Elizabeth to determine later in the run if we’d also see Great Hill. When the time came to decide, she wanted to try it, and try it we did. She seemed to do a bit better than me on the hill, though I am trying to guard against burnout, and hills and showboating are occasions that can trigger burnout in me, so I didn’t push myself that hard. No worries, though, because Great Hills pushed me.
Within the last couple miles, I challenged Elizabeth to a couple of lamppost-to-lamppost sprints at 80% full speed. I weathered them pretty well, feeling strong in them. In the final leg of the course, I also got into my mechanical “robot sprint” and finished strong. Today’s run was not all that fast for me, but if you read my prior post, you know I’m not demanding much of myself. But even despite not demanding much of myself, today was a considerable improvement over the prior run, in terms of pace and distance. Plus, it felt great.
Cheers!
Ben 🙂