15 miles – check.

15 miles is the farthest I’ve ever run. It is about how far my first car a lime-green Buick Regal went on a gallon of gas. It is the length of about 26,400 baguettes laid end to end. 15 miles is about 1/15 the distance between London and Paris, and it is 264 lengths of a football field. It is a distance that world class runners cover in about 1 hour and 10 minutes. I covered it in about 2 hours and 20 minutes… meaning I’m twice as good as world class runners.

It was nice to wake up early on a Sunday and run on empty streets. It was nice that we were visiting my parents for my mom’s birthday, because other than the class A breakfast that was awaiting me after the run, I was able to run new roads, get lost for about an hour, revisit some old haunts (like the field I played spring soccer at as a teenager; the store I bought baseball cards from, and my cousins’ old swim club). It was also hilly, which is supposed to be a good thing when training, but that’s hard to remember as you are struggling up a long steep road. The run was long enough that I got to run by my cousin’s house (twice), my sister’s house (twice) and my aunt and uncle’s house. It was a long enough run that I got to eat two packets of Gu, and a pack of Little Mermaid gummy mermaids.

Took a snow bath at the end of the run, and only had a little calf tightening the next day.

For those of you keeping score and care about birds (meaning no one reading this) the cute little blue posse of birds I saw the other day wrestling around were Eastern Bluebirds… google image them… cute as hell.