Start time: 09/17/05, 7:00am
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 8 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 11:00min/mile

After last week’s 23-miler, throughout the week I ran… nothing! No guilt about it, either. It was a really busy week and with everything else going on, I wanted to try and get a little running time to just let my brain reset, but in the end a week off after a long run was just fine in my book.

Apparently it was also just fine for almost all of the rest of my group to skip the 8-mile “recovery run” scheduled for this Saturday. Out of the 20+ people in our pace group, we had a whopping total of… six. That said, it was a really nice run. Julie, Carla, John, Laura, Katie, and I went at a pretty good clip, and it was just nice to have a small group with which to chit-chat about anything and everything under the sun. (And apparently the race staging ground this year will be in the North Pentagon Parking Lot instead of Rosslyn. Naturally this change was made now that I have moved just a leisurely stroll away from the old starting area in Rosslyn. Bah!)

Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of good people who weren’t at our run site, but there’s something to be said for the nice small group. Having speed training instead of recovery runs has been fantastic but with only three recovery runs scheduled I have sort of missed the small-group-experience.