This weekend I returned to Brisbane. What a fantastic, fantastic trip! I was home for three days and ran every single day with all my favourite people. How much I’ve missed everyone!
Friday: women’s run with my running group.
Chris (the coach) kindly picked me up as I was car-less. Ahh, how I have missed the Friday morning fun! Because we had new people, Chris decided to forego the loop in favour of uphill sprints and stairs. Not steep hills…but lots of stairs. And weird things on stairs that I had to do slowly due to my lack of coordination. But despite this, the laughter and joking never stopped.
Saturday: long slow run with my running group
The group was full of new faces and people I hadn’t seen for weeks, so there was a lot of catching up to do. A fellow runner kindly baked me a belated birthday cake – yum! To quote Chris, I was in the group that was “just doing 12k”. (The fast group was doing 20k). Ah, bliss! How I’ve missed the 12k runs. They are so short and easy. You’re out and back before you know it. No mental psyching up required, no physical exhaustion or stiff muscles following the run, and no time commitment! We split from the fast group who did a completely different route, which was a nice change. While I love starting together, the trouble is that we end up pushing too hard. Chris ran with the back posse group this week and we wound our way through the hills at a slow, easy pace of 6.10. It seemed every hill and corner I was beside someone different. The run was over far too quickly – 12ks are like that, but most of us went up for breakfast and hung around for the next couple of hours catching up.
Total time: 1.13.18
Sunday: social run!
Sunday I did a social run with my two most loyal & favourite social run friends (you know who you are!). How fantastic is it to be able to catch up while going for a walk/run? We did a loop around the uni, cutting it short as my friends had a time limit due to other engagements. We alternated between an easy jog and a walk. As one of them pointed out, it’s nice to have friends I can catch up with on a run. It gets me out the door and aside from sleep, not many activities are planned at 7am. And who would want to sleep at 7am when you could be out running with friends? Pace – who cares? That’s what’s great about social runs! J
All that fantastic running over the weekend made me realize that maybe I haven’t just been lazy with my “semi-off-season” running these past few weeks. Maybe I’ve simply lacked the motivation to go out when I haven’t encountered anyone as fantastic to run with as my Brisbane group (I’m counting both the running group and my social running friends in this!). Running with others is not for everyone – some people are better at being a lone wolf. Me, I’ve discovered the joy of running in a pack.
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