New Gear and an Old Running Buddy

Tonight, I hurried home from work and dressed myself in one of my newest outfits. I know I said that the Friday before Baltimore was like Christmas Eve because of all the excitement and anticipation. But it was really more like Christmas because of all the wonderful new presents I bought myself. It's pretty fun to still be testing out those many presents.

Tonight I wore New Balance running shorts an Insport top. Both were awesome.

I have quickly learned that there is life beyond the realm of brightly colored Nike tempo shorts, with these and the new saucony shorts I tested out on Thursday. These are a little prettier and more girly which I like. They also have a vel-cro pocket on the right butt cheek, about the size of a credit card, designed with a small hole in it so that it can hold an ipod and feed the headphones through. This may be an old trend but it's still genius.

The shirt was a last minute purchase at the expo because it was cute and simple but looked really short.  It was but it fits perfectly otherwise and I decided to give it a try tonight. It ended up being fine and din't ride up at all. I googled "insport running" to learn about this company I had never heard of and their website redirected me to shopnewbalance.com. So I guess they don't exist anymore. But if you find any insport running gear on sale at your next race expo, I would suggest you get some. It's light and pretty and the armpits smell better than any other shirt I own after a 5 mile run!

The sparkly pink headband I wore was not the most secure but beauty is pain, right? And by pain, I mean frustration. Not something I'd wear in a race but it's good to have for the next 80's throwback party I get invited to.

But enough with my sweaty style. The important thing about tonight is that I ran with my old running buddy Nikki for the first time since our races last weekend, and possibly since our 13 mile run together in September. It was nice to just run and was much easier to plan now that neither of us are training for anything specific. It's funny though, we ran faster together tonight than I think we ever have before. We've obviously come a long way through our race training over the past few months, especially Nikki who I was a little worried about keeping up with. But we ran fast and we talked the whole way.

We really need some new pictures running together...

I was excited to see what our pace would be because I felt like we were booking it. But then, when we stopped at our corner to continue talking before saying goodbye, I forgot to stop the clock, bringing mile 5 to a 13 minute pace. I sped home to bring it back down but it still finished close to 11 minutes. Thank goodness for Garmin connect, I can ignore mile 5 and still analyze our splits for the others. Not too shabby for all the chatting we were doing.

Since this little details chart, which I've never paid much attention to after previous runs, tells me my overall time and my "moving time", I can assume that I stood still with my clock running for 2:07. If I subtract that from our overall time, and enter all the info into the cool running calculator, I am told that the true average pace overall was 8:59.92.

And just for kicks, here's the elevation we dealt with in our city. It's no Baltimore but it'll still give your legs a run for their money. Ignore the little dips in miles 1 and 2- that happens when I run over bridges and it thinks I just fell into an abyss and then climbed a cliff to get back out. I'm not exactly that hardcore, garmin friend, but I'm workin on it.

It was a perfect fall evening and I am feeling really good about gaining speed. Again, I could give my new shoes and clothes credit, but I think my legs and the energy I get from my running buddy deserve it!