Perhaps it's time for a new watch

Saturday morning, like most other Saturday mornings that I run, I woke up, made some coffee and oatmeal and turned new to catch the weather. I got dressed and as I was putting the last few items into my bag, a dry t shirt and towel that came in very handy, I grabbed my Garmin off its charger. As I tossed it in my bag, I happened to notice the screen was blank. Apparently it died while on the charger overnight. With less than 15 minutes to meet my friend Erika, there was nothing I could do to revive my lately not-so-trusty running watch.

As luck would have it, the day I didn't have my Garmin, I ran the furthest I have run since the marathon in April. Fortunately Erika did. So for the first 10.25 miles of my run, she clocked our mileage. We ran a loop from Fresh Pond to the Mass Ave bridge along the Charles and back. When we arrived back at Fresh Pond, Erika took off for home and I stayed to run with the run club at Whole Foods.

In a few weeks, I'll be leading a run club from the Whole Foods in Newtonville, so I wanted to check this one out and see what to expect and to be supportive. Whole Foods is sponsoring a 5K on Sept 18 and mix1 is sponsoring these run clubs to help raise some excitement for the race. The turnout at the run club was modest, but the people were super nice. Group leader Chris did a great job making sure everyone knew where they were going and were having a good time. I was taking notes.

My plan to do one loop around Fresh Pond for about 3 more miles, somehow turned into 2 loops. The loops are ~2.5 miles, but with the back and forth from the parking lot, I'm not really sure what the total distance was. The inaccuracy of my mileage and not knowing my pace would bother me on any day, but because this was a new route and a longer than usual run, it's killing me that I don't know! I'm chalking it up to 15+ miles and will just have to run the route again sometime if I really need to know.

Up ahead is the Falmouth Road Race next Sunday, August 14. This is another of my repeat races from the summer of 2008. That year I ran the race in 55:39, 7:57 pace. The goal next week is to run faster than that. Stay tuned...