THIS Is Why I Run

I’m lying on my couch right now, with my little dog and my iced coffee by my side and a bit of the cool fall air coming in through my window, and I am CONTENT. (Even though I am Team Summer for life, even I can appreciate a pretty fall day…so long as I can still wear my favorite flip flops.) I’m signed up for a T-Swift vs. Katy Perry Soul Cycle ride later for recovery and for a little Sunday night rocking. I have a day full of what my friend Karen calls “Life Admin” ahead, and I’m truly happy about a productive little Sunday.

But yesterday! Yesterday I had the kind of morning that reminded me just why I do this running thing.

Why I choose to wake up at the ass crack of dawn on the weekends to get my miles in. 

Why I carefully monitor everything I eat the day before to avoid any stomach issues on the run.

Why I ingest those weird foil packets of sugar and slather my body with Aquaphor to avoid chafing. 

Yesterday, I had 17 miles planned. I’ve run that long quite a few times by now, but it still makes me nervous, especially since my training has been so compressed this time. There’s so much that can go wrong when you’re running FOR HOURS. But after a little freakout in the morning, I chose to focus on the positive.

I was choosing to do this run. It was a beautiful day. My back healed remarkably well. I was meeting up with Megan (aka MegaNerdRuns for any of you who remember her blog!) and some coworkers to run this city. 

I hadn’t done a Nike Run Club long run since 2011, which is when I met Gia! (Side note: I am currently wearing the same sweatshirt as I was in that post.) But I knew I didn’t want to run alone, so I ran up to Niketown and then ran around midtown a bit in circles to get to three miles before we started.

This is after, but it was about that crowded before, too. (P.S. If you’re on Snapchat, I’m theodorable211.)

I’ve run thousands of miles through this city, but this was a brand-new route for me. We started at the store, went over the Queensboro, through a bit of LIC, over the Roosevelt Island Bridge, a loop around Roosevelt Island, BACK to LIC, BACK over the Queensboro, up First Ave for a bit, the lower loop of Central Park and back to the store. Thank god we never lost our pacer, because there were a lot of turns there!

With all of those bridges, it was definitely a challenging route! Considering I’m also running NYC, it was great for me to get some hills/bridges in. I haven’t seen Megan in probably at least two years, but we just chatted and caught up like it was yesterday, and it was great! We also made a few buddies in our pace group, including one very cute guy. We were in the 9:30 pace group, which ended up being just right for both of us. Sometimes we were running a little too fast (I’d look down and see sub-9 miles and rein it back in), but the stoplights must have slowed us down because I ended the run with an average pace of 9:39. 

The last NRC long run I did years ago was frustrating because they went way faster than advertised, but yesterday’s run was right on pace AND they had set up a few awesome water stops for us. 10/10, would run again. My only gripe was that there was a race on Roosevelt Island while we were running there, and the race organizers seemed pissed (rightly so) that hundreds of runners were running through the island while they were trying to put on a race. You would think that Nike would have looked into something like that before bringing hundreds of people there?

I am so happy to report that everything felt great the entire time. I was able to keep a conversational pace, and I really only felt spent the last two miles. But I think that’s because my fueling was a bit off: I took a gel at mile 6 of the long run, which was really my mile 9, and probably could have used another one around mile 15 or so. But that’s what training is for — figuring those things out before the big day. 

STRAIGHT CHEESING + weird face contorting?

Most importantly, I found my marathon outfit: these shorts + this top. Done and done.

YES!

Tell me about an awesome run you had lately where everything just fell into place.