Run For Pemle: Amanda's Team in Training Blog: What a real rabbit looks like...

(Hint: It's NOT the one in pink.)

Bright and early on Saturday morning, six intrepid women met in a parking lot to get in their three miles. You met Lindsey last week, and Angie and Molly are next to me in the picture above. We were joined by Elizabeth and Brittany to make an even half-dozen. The weather was fabulous by Frozen Tundra standards; as Lindsey put it, "It's just too beautiful not to run outside!" Note that in our neck of the woods, "beautiful" means "above freezing, not precipitating, with winds of less than 30 miles an hour." It reminds me of that scene at the end of Fargo where Marge Gunderson has the bad guy in the back seat of the cruiser, and she's taking him in with heavy snow falling. The wind is making it snow horizontally, and she laments that the bad guy did all of these horrible things "...for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that?" And then she adds, "And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day," without the slightest hint of irony.

Elizabeth had handily mapped out a 3.1 mile route for us, so after a bit of chitchat, off we go. We're all pretty close together for the first mile or so, but after we go up a steep hill, we have spread out considerably. Those of us up front walk and jog back and forth until everyone is together again, and when we set off once more, I make the mistake of running with Molly. Molly looks like a "real" runner because, as it turns out, she IS one. She held a 9:20 mile pace throughout the half-marathon she ran a couple months ago. Just think about that. Holding a 9:20 pace over 13 miles is pretty amazing. (Also note that this is faster than the 9:40 pace I managed during my 5K race. She held a faster pace for over 4 times the distance.) No, no need to adjust your monitor. That green tint is just my envy showing.

After managing to keep up with Molly for a half-mile or so, I look back and see absolutely no one. "Uh, we'd better run back to them," I venture, and we do. It doesn't help matters that Elizabeth, the only one who knows our exact route, is bringing up the rear. Once we're all together again, I tell Molly to just go on ahead and run back to us if she can no longer see us, and fall in with Lindsey and Angie instead.

The haphazard back-and-forthing continues ("Are we supposed to turn left here or at the next street?" "I don't know, let's run back and find out!"), but it provides a nice variation in pace and shakes things up a little, so it's kind of like an interval workout. I get back to the starting point of our loop at 40:05 on my watch, but I am certain I covered more than 3.1 miles with all of the back-and-forth. I'm entering it in my log as 3.6 miles in 40:05 for an 11:08 pace, which seems about right for the way I felt (mostly conversational, but with challenging bits here and there). In retrospect, I probably should have run it a bit slower, but there you go...