~13+ miles @ ~12.3 min/mi
"Are you practicing for curling?" I ask the lady on roller skates in the middle of the road as she sweeps back and forth with her yellow broom.
"No, just clearing off acorns!" she replies. It's a bit before 7am and I'm jogging along Rock Creek Trail toward Candy Cane City, where Megan O'Rourke and I plan to meet and run ~10 miles or so today. I arrive early, with a bit more than 2 miles on the GPS, and after visiting the portajohn meander a bit on the fields until Megan materializes. We head north along RCT to East-West Hwy, take it west to Jones Bridge, and thence join the Capital Crescent Trail. Megan is training for an Ironman Triathlon next year, and we discuss features of that endeavor. At the Bethesda end of the tunnel I find a like-new Queen of Hearts playing card on the ground and pick it up. Nearby there's another card face-down, which turns out to be a Ten of Hearts. "That's the start of a good hand!" a passing runner says.
"I'm trying to draw to an inside straight," I tell him. Megan and I turn north and take Norfolk St to the Bethesda Trolley Trail. Megan lived nearby a few years ago. I'm getting low on energy — our pace is a bit too fast for me to sustain on this warm, humid morning. I also weigh too much, and ate a lot last night. Megan laughs at the excuses I offer in anticipation of poor performance in the Marine Corps Marathon less than two months from now.
We take a walk break as the BTT enters NIH. I swallow a couple of S! electrolyte capsules, which soon seem to help. Smoke from the Bethesda Community Store barbecue cooker tickles our noses as we run north along Old Georgetown Rd. I keep threatening to take my shirt off, as sweaty friction starts to cause "mana burn", but mercifully for passersby manage to keep it on the whole day. There's only a little bleeding and a wince in the shower afterwards.
Alas, after half a dozen miles Megan begins to feel bad ITB pain in her right knee, a problem that she experienced several months ago and thought that she had fixed. We walk a bit, and as we pass the Boy Scout Store at the corner of Cedar Ln and Rockville Pike I talk about the leather wallet kits that Paulette's sister Kathy Dickerson bought there a couple of days ago. Soon we're over the hill, under the Beltway, and arrive at Rock Creek Trail. I refill my empty water bottle at the fountain. Megan's ITB now gets ugly enough that we throttle back to a walk. Fellow runners greet us as we stroll, chat, and enjoy the morning. An elderly stooped-over gentleman meets us outbound and passes us again on his way back. "Jingle Bells!" he says. An allusion to my gray Santa-esque beard?
Megan mentions Madison Wisconsin, near where she grew up. I tell her about how I once memorized (but have now forgotten) an alphabetical list of the US states and their capital cities by associating each one with a quarter-mile stretch of Rock Creek Trail. Just inside the Beltway I branch off RCT to run up Ireland Dr to home, with Megan's permission leaving her to trek the final miles back to Candy Cane. I'm sweat-soaked but feel strong and blitz the hills. A final loop around the block ensures that the total distance exceeds a half-marathon. The RunKeeper data from the iPhone and the Garmin GPS data concur.
^z - 2012-09-15