Running with Friends

Me modelling the Spring/Summer 2011 collection.

As you may or may not know I tend to do 98% of my runs on my own, not through choice, but because of the times I am able to run, and mine and other peoples schedules not fitting in. This as you can imagine makes getting out the door and doing all these runs a little bit more difficult, so it was really good to be able to do a long run with my firend and work colleague Ed on Friday afternoon. We both booked Friday PM off of work, as Ed had told me earlier in the week he wanted to do a long run of over 26.2miles (Marathon distance) but couldn't do it Saturday or Sunday. We decided on 28.2miles, and Ed worked out a route that took in Bushy Park, Twickenham, Syon Park, Brentford, Kew Bridge and then onto the Thames Path and the 10 or so miles back to East Molesey where we had parked the cars. This would be Ed's furthest ever run and his first ever Ultra distance run, or as I said to Ed, his first proper distance run (!). We decided on a comfortable 8.45pace and promptly did the first mile in 8.20 (oops), it's easy to do this when you are talking and not concentrating, especially as both of us can run at 8.20 pretty easily. With a bit more concentration we got the speed down and the run itself went pretty quickly, as it tends to when you have good company, in fact over the last 4 or so miles I told Ed to slow down as he was gathering pace, Ed has a tendency to start to speed up near the end (he's in race mode from all the Coastal Half Marathon races he has been doing with his better half, Fi). He even suggested we do 30miles as he was feeling good!!!! Thankfully I had almost run out of drink, so talked him out of it (without much effort I hasten to add) but I was also a bit tired as I had run the previous 3days, and our pace had averaged 8.40pace for the whole 28.2miles.
All in all a really good run, and well done to Ed for going Ultra, which is good as he has already signed up to do the 44mile Classic Quarter in Lands End this June, I am of course going along to run it with him, it's a agreat course but v tough, as I learnt last year.
I have also received some The Shooting Star Children's Hospice t-shirts which I will be modelling during most runs over the next few weeks (as per the photo in this post), thank you to Karen and Alicja of the fundraising team for sending them to me.

A solid 70.1 miles run last week, more of the same this week only more so! Seems to be a recurring theme here.......