~14 miles @ ~11.5 min/mi

Ken Swab pulls up his car and rolls down his window as I'm passing Meadowbrook Stables at 7:55am. "Excuse me, Sir," he says, "have you seen any runners near here?" Hordes of runners from MCRRC training programs and elsewhere are streaming along Rock Creek Trail as we talk.

"No," I tell him, "it's illegal to run here, by County Ordinance."

The parking lot at Candy Cane City is almost full — Barry Smith gets a space but Ken and Emaad Burki, Sara Crum, and Rebecca Rosenberg have to park elsewhere. After about 15 minutes of random-walk we all get together and set off down Beach Dr. Barry turns back after a few miles, but remainder of the crew proceeds to the park just north of Peirce Mill where Ken and I tag the big rocks that frame the path before turning back. Including all breaks the mile splits are approximately 10:45 + 9:59 + 17:58 (waiting for folks to park) + 15:00 (more searching to find each other) + 10:28 + 9:59 + 10:24 + 9:41 + 10:50 + 11:21 + 12:37 (latrine break) + 10:20 + 9:48 + 10:26 — overall quite fast, an average moving pace (leaving out the ~15 minutes of waiting around at Candy Cane City) of ~10.5 min/mi.

Conversation along the way is rather bawdy; Emaad and Sara and Ken are notorious for humorous riffing on crude themes. At one point I deliberately attempt to raise the tone by telling Rebecca about a segment in Chapter 5 of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man about aesthetics (see PortraitOfTheArtist). My attempt fails, and banter quickly returns to the gutter. The Jimmy Fallon "Jogstrap" parody-commercial comes to someone's mind (see [1]). See Garmin GPS and Runkeeper app for distance and pace estimates that agree to within 1%.

^z - 2013-02-10