7 miles!

We’ve reached the point in our training where we start halving our long runs every other weekend. So since we ran 14 miles last week, we did only seven this week. In theory, we increase our long-long runs by two miles every time we run them, but next weekend we’re mysteriously running 17 miles. I’m still working on wrapping my brain around that extra mile.

On Saturday, we had weather that was just on the warm side of lovely and we pounded out our seven miles with no troubles at all. It was warm enough, in fact, that I dared run without my shirt for the first time—which made me more susceptible to suffering heatstroke, blinding innocent passers-by with my Marie Antoinette-like pastiness and enduring the derisive laughter of children:

Here we are at mile two. See that guy I’m running with? We talked about kitchen renovations almost the whole run:

Here we are a mile later, still discussing the finer points of tiling our backsplashes:

By mile five, we’d exhausted all things kitchen and we talked about ... um ... oh, we were probably still taking about our kitchens. Long runs can really undermine interesting conversations that way:

Here we are in our traditional post-run portrait. And for the first time in two summers I GOT TO HOLD THE SIGN:

We were missing two people in that picture, though, because young Ryan had missed enough long runs he decided to do 12 on Saturday. George, who already runs two miles from his house every morning just to get to our training runs, graciously ran with him. So they got their own private finishers’ portrait. If I still had Photoshop, I’d try to blend them badly into our team picture, but I don’t so I won’t: