Start time: 07/29/06, 7:00am
Location: Downtown Washington DC
Distance: 10 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 7:1, then 6:1
Average pace: 9:30min/mile

I ran with the Saturday group this morning and… phew! Apparently there really is no place like home. One big problem was that the 9:00 group is really small, so the two groups apparently merge on a regular basis. The problem was, in the words of the coach at the site, “That group really runs between an 8:30 and 9:00 pace.” Turns out there’s someone else normally there that sort of takes the 9:30 part of the group under her wing, but wasn’t there. Yay. The good news is that Katie (from last Sunday) was there so the two of us ran together. The group was fast out of the gate and about two-and-a-half miles in we gave up on keeping up with them. So we had a perfectly good run together, although by the end I felt a little queasy and dehydrated; a combination of a Paula-Radcliffe-esque need for a bathroom break (thankfully unlike everyone’s favorite winner of the London Marathon, I hung onto my decorum for the last mile) and perhaps eating a little too much cookie dough while baking last night. Oops.

On the bright side, we’d been zooming enough at the beginning that even with slowing down a tiny bit for the end stretch, still a solid 9:30 pace. (And ultimately it was just an extra two minutes of walking at one point, and another brief walk break when I sucked down water into my windpipe. Whoops.) Very, very, very nice people at the Saturday site, but I think despite Sundays being just me and Stephanie most of the time I’ll take that. Definitely.