~2.5 miles @ ~10.5 min/mi

It's dark at 5:30am, and a temperature of 40°F in light rain isn't too comforting either. But when I arrive Kristin has already been running laps for almost half an hour on the rubbery ~1/6th mile path at Clemyjontri Park next to Georgetown Pike in northern Virginia. I've jogged past here dozens of times since 2009 but never ventured inside. It's called "one of the world's coolest playgrounds" but in the gloom we can't see much of it. Kristin and I do about 15 loops together, chatting about how we met our respective spouses, meltdowns that our kids had recently, etc. We have some spooky parallels in our families, though I'm a couple of decades farther down the road ahead of her. The Garmin GPS credits us with ~2.77 miles together at ~10 min/mi pace. Runkeeper's app on the iPhone is more conservative, at 2.60 miles and ~11 min/mi. Split the difference, and add ~2 miles for Kristen's warm-up. Afterwards she stretches while I attempt to do a pull-up, and fail. We drive the few miles down the road to the office and get to work.

^z - 2012-12-20