Interesting day with the running group

Today was the first day of "regular" running with DC Fit. During this past week, I convinced my sister to join. She decided to try running this year, and wants to do a half marathon this fall. She also realized she'd never do it by herself as she doesn't like running very much yet, and doesn't have the discipline to train for 5 months without help.

When we got there, she was wandering around meeting the people in her pace group, I saw her talking with a girl I talked with a bit last week. Turns out my sister knew her; she is married to the son of a friend of our father's from college (ok, that is really unreadable -- our father has a friend he met in college; that guy has a son who got married last year to this girl). Anyway, I didn't know who this girl was when we met and talked last week (I didn't attend the wedding, but my sister did). Out on the run today, I passed her. As I passed her, she yells after me, "Wait, you're Sherri's brother, right?" "Um, yeah." "I'm Kevin Sherry's wife! I didn't realize it was you when we were talking last week." (and here you see why my father and my father's friend wanted my sister and his son to marry -- she'd be Sherri Sherry)

The coaches were screwing with the pace groups today, so they ended up combining the advanced (sub-8 minute/mi) with the intermediate (8-9:30/mi), but gave the group to the advanced coach. For some reason, DC Fit has different pace groups running different distances, which part of me gets and part of me doesn't (slower runners may be newer and not as in running shape as faster runners, but everyone still has to run 13 or 26 miles at the race on the same day). The advanced coach thought we were running the advanced schedule, though most of us expected had been going off the intermediate schedule. Granted, the advanced was a 6 mile run and the intermediate was a 5 mile, so it's not a big difference, but it lent itself to an air of confusion.

I was chatting with a group of people in my group, so when we started out, I took off with them. As soon as we set out, I realized they were faster than me -- I am hoping to work through at least the early part of training at a 9/9:15ish pace. When we reached the turnaround at 2.5 miles, we were at 8:40 pace. I let them go and ran a little slower on the way back. I still finished in a bit under 45 minutes, so I ran a pretty decent 5 miles for me, and felt pretty good at the end, but 8:45 is a pace I can't sustain right now. I was having fun meeting some of the people I'll be spending my Saturday mornings with for the next 5 months, so it was still a good thing.

Ok, I now need to go finish packing, because I leave for the airport in about an hour. While I will be spending most of the next week at a workshop for work, tomorrow, I am going to be here:

Multnomah Falls

I'm bringing my running shoes on the trip, so hopefully I'll get a chance to get away from the work stuff a bit and get out on the road. Happy trails!