Weekend Recap

My long endurance training took a little bit of a twist this weekend.

Instead of a 20 mile long run on Saturday, I broke it up into an 11-miler on Saturday and a 9-miler on Sunday. While some would see this as a failure of sorts, I’m counting it as an experiment called the double long weekend run. For those who’s never heard of it, the idea is to do two consecutive medium runs within 24 hours at slightly faster than the usual slow long run pace to build consistency and break up the hyped up emphasis on the single slow long run. Sounds perfectly logical and rational, right? It doesn’t at all sound like I was just trying to skimp out on doing the 20-miler, does it? Of course not, what a rhetorical question!

My Saturday morning run was dreadful because I slept too late the night before, woke up too early that morning, and got annoyed by the maze of barricades restricting the roadways at Central Park at 8:00AM in preparation for the Bon Jovi concert at 8:00PM later that night. (Seriously, folks, was that really necessary to set up roadblocks 12 hours before the concert!)

Sunday’s run was a bit more pleasant. I got to run with my parents (first time ever!) in a beautiful park next to a bay. I even extended my run to do the full 9 by running through an Army Reserve Training Facility. I ran through that section of town pretty quickly because there were signs everywhere reminding me that I was under the jurisdiction of the Army Reserve, which I interpreted to mean that I was fair game for target practice while I was on their property. This part of the course notwithstanding, the entire 9 mile trek was quite scenic and enjoyable, and I was able to maintain a relatively good pace throughout the run.

After we showered and cleaned up, my parents and I went for a nice barbecue at my aunt’s place which was just a block away from where my parent’s lived. My mom and aunt had invited all their neighborhood friends over for a summer party. There were about 20 people at the party that night. Oh, did I mention that my parents only moved into their new place just a few short months ago. Yeah, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. My parents actually have more of an extensive social network living in an obscure section of Queens than I do in the middle of Manhattan. Go figure! At least there was good food, good conversation (I met a newbie marathon runner at the party) and good times to be had all around. If only I could carbo-load like that before my marathons!