Start time: 5/17/03, 8:00am
Location: W&OD Trail
Activity: Running
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:1
Average pace: 14:00min/mile

If you’d asked me all winter long, my running plans for this year were set in stone. Run the Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon in August, then train through that fall and winter to do the Mardi Gras Marathon at the end of February. (Not, thankfully, during Mardi Gras itself.) But with the coming of spring began longings… to run a full marathon in 2003… to be able to train for a marathon with shorts instead of sweatpants… and to tackle the Marine Corps Marathon one more time and see if the second time through I could do even better.

So in the end, after a lot of debate, my friend Julie and I signed up to do the AIDS Marathon summer program one more time. Right now we’re definitely going to still run the Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon in August, as well as the Marine Corps Marathon at the end of October. We may still do the Mardi Gras program afterwards, or another early 2004 race to take its place (a little voice on the West Coast keeps whispering “Long Beach Marathon” to me), but we’ll see.

We missed the first two weeks of this program, so we decided to jump right in with everyone else the third week. We’d run some smaller races this spring so we knew how our speed was looking, and since we had just done a 3-miler two weeks ago anyway, we figured we were ready for a 5-miler this Saturday. What was especially nice is that we had two people that’d we’d run with before in our group; Madelyn, who we’d run with in 2001 and 2002, is in the 14:00 group, and also there is John, who we ran with in 2001. It always makes such a big difference to have a familiar face or two waiting!

We had a much larger group this year—last year’s group only had six people (and on any given weekend someone was always missing!), but this week there were no less than twelve. I suspect our numbers will dwindle with time, but for now it was an interesting experience trying to keep so many people together. We unfortunately only had eight in the group by the time we finished; two runners were having some leg problems and turned around early, and John and someone else slowed down a little bit because the cold, yucky weather was playing havoc with John’s breathing.

By the time we were done running, though, it felt really good to be back up in the swing of things. I was feeling a little hesitant all week about this, but by the time we left I knew we’d made the right decision. It should be a fun six months!