Start: 6:00AM
Just as The Weather Channel had predicted, it was warm, wet & windy when I woke up at 5:20AM. Shorts, T-shirt and Team Tania socks would work fine. It was pretty dark and foggy, so I put on the Reflecto-Vest and Team Tania blinkie, to be safe and to be seen. I couldn’t count on what traffic there was to be very attentive to the little dude running around on Black Friday, as they would probably be cursing themselves out for getting to WalMart so “late.”
My choice for my first course route was easy; I had to run past our Church, so I could see The Blessed Mother: say a Hail Mary; give extra thanks for my family, friends and relatives; and ask for to watch over me on this silly thing I was doing. I wasn’t racing for time today, so what was a minute or so, right??? [even on days when I have raced this course, on my own, just for fun, I’ve always stopped there, too, so …]
I reached the mile and a half turn in 13 minutes or so. I wasn’t running for time on the day, but I still wanted to keep myself around a 9-minute mile pace, for clock management’s sake. I cruised down the street towards Chocolate Pretzel Heaven, and passed the spot where a few months earlier, the first rumblings of what would become “The Big POING!!!” in my calf came upon me. It was there that Left Brain calculated / recalled that we reached 0.7 miles left to go in THIS LEG, we would have run EXACTLY 500 miles for the year. That’s nothing compared to what some of marathoning friends do, but pretty impressive [I must say] for a dude who runs for - essentially - no reason whatsoever.
I rounded the final turn into the development as the 6:26AM train whistled at the crossing about a mile away. I refrained from throwing any kind of a kick or sprint in at the end; we still had a long day ahead and had only reached the first “virtual water stop”
On to the Second Leg >>>
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