All Fun on the Beach

Hot, sunny, humid Florida! What a perfect place for a run on the beach. (And stuffing my face with food, and visiting my grandfather, and shopping...but let's keep to the running side of things, shall we?)
My grandfather lives right on the Gulf of Mexico, with a beautiful 4k board walk out front. But who wants a board walk when you can have BEACH?
So I tied up my laces and out I went onto the beach.
Beach running is tough, but fun. It is always a challenge to push off against the soft sand. I wasn't sure how far I was going to run (other than "not really far, but not really short, either"). But fortunately the beach has two rock borders on it, so I felt it was fair to run from one to the other and back again.
Fortunately, it had rained earlier in the morning which cooled off the temperature quite a bit. And it even drizzled with a welcome rain while I was running. (Warm rain! How I've missed warm rain!!!)
It was fun to run along the wet sand and play chase with the waves. After the first 500m I gave up trying to keep a decent pace and focussed on a decent effort instead.

A round trip between the two rock borders was 7.3km. But that was soooo close to 8k, I just had to push a little more! So I ran a little bit past my grandfather's condo to get a nice round figure of 8k. As I stopped my watch, I noticed I was at around 53min. Much slower than my 8k race time of around 42min, but then, this was all beach!
And it was alllll fun.

PS - I still can't believe I signed up for the relay next week! 16k through the mountains! Yikes!!! I definitely don't feel ready for it.