Panera II

Today the running group is doing the Panera II route, the route that goes west on Hwy 20, back behind our old apartment, to the paved loop trail back there. Nice little run, all paved, with little reason to have to break/stop (except one major intersection to cross).

We had two new people at running today--Ken and Julie. Julie is a friend of John Becker. Ken just seemed to know a few people.

As we run, I ran pretty much by myself. Still not fast enough for the faster runners, but faster than the slow group. Luckily I remembered to bring my music this week, so it wasn't so bad. Also, since I've only run this route twice before, it's still kind of "new" scenery.

At about 2.8 miles and rounding to head back, Ken came up behind me and joined me. He's a much faster runner so after a few minutes of chatting, I encouraged him to go on ahead. He said my pace was OK and he'd stay with me. At first I dreaded it as I was getting a bit winded, but it was good as he kept me going at this nice, faster clip. We had a nice chat. He met Jud years ago and previously worked with Ralph. He also knew Melissa from SCJ. I also learned that he was the father of the bride that was featured in the newspaper a few weeks back as running on her wedding day with her wedding party and about 40 guests. It was a nice story when I read it then, and it was neat to meet the guy. As we were chatting, I learned his daughter was in school for Med Tech. Of course I went into recruiter mode and shared the high need we have for Med Techs and encouraged him to tell his daughter to start looking around Feb for next summer jobs.

When I shared about Bill's recent marathon, and his 50 in 50 by 50 goal, he was really fascinated by that. Then he shared his own goal--to run the distance of the circumference of the world by age 50! That's a neat goal and he already accomplished it and is still running. I wouldn't be diligent enough to track every mile to do that, but he did. He's run in 7 countries, 30+ states, and 44 cities. Wow. This chit-chat was nice to have on the last part of the run.

I had cut the mid-point of the run a little short by not running all the way to Old Spring Street (they have now paved the back part of the path across so you can just connect before the roads). This then gave me a 4.42 mile run in 42:43 minutes (9:40/mile pace). Although a little shorter than the 5 mile run I did two weeks ago, it was at :35/mile faster pace! Probably would have been about 2-3 minutes faster overall also, but I was stuck behind the slow group initially and had to work around them to get going.

Nice run with nice company (for part of the run) today!