Start time: 12/13/05, 6:30pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 3 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 11:05min/mile

Last week I told Julie that if her toe got green light for running again, that we’d start going after work (despite the rather dark conditions) and hoofing it up and down the W&OD. I’ve had bad motivation problems in getting up early and running, and I knew that Julie was in the same boat. With the broken toe, things were even more problematic; after running the 26-miler in October 1st she promptly broke the toe, and all she’d run since then was the marathon on October 30th.

So, Julie asked for a 3-miler to get her back into the swing of things. I said “sure!” and away we went. We ran on the Custis Trail portion of the W&OD since it’s A) well lit, and B) plowed clear of snow. So what we ended up doing was starting at marker 5, running to marker 4, turning around and going back to 4.5, then back to 4 again, and finally finishing at 5. (The Custis veers off right after mile marker #4 and while the logical turn would be to just run on the Custis further, so far as I can tell it doesn’t have its own mile markers.) For someone who hasn’t run in a month and a half (and hadn’t run for a month before that), Julie did fantastic. She was convinced that she was dragging us down (when we finished she even said, “So how slow was I?”) but our splits were 10:46, 11:09, and 11:19. Not bad at all after such a long break (and then freezing once we were out there).

I’m not 100% sure if we’ll get another weekday run in tomorrow or not but next week we’ll hopefully back into the twice-a-week-after-work schedule. It felt really good to me to be back out there other than a Saturday morning.