18+ miles @ ~11:40 min/mi

Ken invites me to accompany him during his Capitol Hill Running Club jog today, led by Marine Corps members as part of an MCM training program. A nearly full moon sets in the west as the red disc of the sun, haze-filtered, looms beside the Iwo Jima Memorial. I sit quietly while the group does stretches. "It's all about the running for you," a Marine colonel observes. "Nah, I'm just not a member of the club!" I respond with a grin. The colonel sets off with a "slow" group downhill past Arlington Cemetery to the Mount Vernon Trail (MVT) — but since "slow" to him means sub-11 pace, after a few miles I deliberately lag behind. Ken is charitable enough to stick with me.

A helpful young corporal has set up an aid station at ~5.5 miles, where we catch up with a few compatriots and I refill a water bottle. In Alexandria we briefly zig-zag with some of the group to a dead-end waterfront wharf where construction has blocked the trail. Since this is only ~90 minutes out I'm sure we haven't reached the halfway point. Ken and I backtrack, detour, and continue below the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge to the "official" 9 mile cone. This still feels a bit short, so we take a side path and visit the southernmost DC Boundary Stone , placed at the Jones Point lighthouse on April 15, 1791 by surveyors Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker during an elaborate Masonic ceremony.

Now it's definitely turnabout time. The heat and humidity are slowly cooking me, and after two hours my singlet and shorts are totally drenched. I extend my walk breaks and increase their frequency; our pace slows to ~12 min/mi. When we arrive at mile ~13 the kind corporal there helps us refill our bottles and gives us banana and orange slices. Passenger jets roar overhead as the MVT takes us by the end of the main runway at Reagan National Airport. Ken and I notice the time and wonder how Caren Jew (on the Punxsutawney Groundhog 50k in Pennsylvania) and Ruth Martin (on the Marathon du Medoc in France) are doing now. We manage a final ~11-minute mile in their honor before branching off the MVT at Memorial Bridge. "I am a leaf on the wind," I say in an effort to feel lighter on my feet. (It's a line from the sf movie Serenity by Joss Whedon.) "Or maybe," I tell Ken, "I'm a wet leaf stuck to the bottom of somebody's shoe."