your friend beside you...

"Nothing’s better than the wind at your back, the sun in front of you and your friend beside you." – A runner’s creed (and a walker's, too!)


A few weeks ago a very dear friend of mine participated in, and completed (yay!), a half-marathon in NYC.  She asked me a few months before if I would do it with her, and I said I'd love to.  As life would have it, it turned out I wasn't able to go, for several reasons (one of them being Jack, and his health issues).  I had already spent several months training with my friend, so I was disappointed.  Well, the half-marathon is done, but we had so much fun training that we decided to continue.   After a couple of weeks off for Rose to "recover",  last weekend we were back at it.  When we last trained together we had just reached 13 miles, but after a few weeks off we thought it best to start back up with about 8 miles.  We are both over 50 now (how did that happen?!), so we do a sort of walk-run combination. More walking than running, I think.  So 8 miles takes us about an hour and 45 minutes.  Perfect amount of time to catch up on each other's news and look at and comment on some of the great houses we pass by. We are only able to spend that amount of time training on the weekend, so during the week we train separately, running/walking about 4 miles, 3 days a week.  Since we've both done that for years, I'm not sure we can really call it "training", though!


We are training with the idea that we will both be in next year's half-marathon together.  That may or may not actually happen, but either way we'll enjoy the training. And the talking.  And the house looking.