The Old Runner

If there had been another race around we would have probably ended up there instead, but having made the trip for the 14th Annual Run/Walk for the Greenway I'm really glad we ended up in Salisbury. It's a first class 5k race all the way: a beautiful course mostly on the greenway with a nice finish on the school track, great organization with lots of volunteers, plenty of food (donuts, chicken nuggets, and lots of good stuff), beautiful trophies, a ton of nice door prizes given out just before the awards, and a nice size crowd of 246 finishers. It was hot, of course, as you would expect in July, and being one of the hottest days of the summer it was pretty steamy at the 8 a.m. start. Because of the heat, many of the runners I talked to felt like their times were a little off. I felt good and won my age group but was a little disappointed that my 21:07 time was actually 19 seconds slower than a 5k tempo run I did on the treadmill just two days ago. Maybe that's not surprisi...

The T-shirt says, The Scream! Half Marathon is "13.1 Miles of Pure Hill!" That's not entirely true. While there are probably 8 or 9 miles of downhill that will make your quads and calves scream with delight (or possibly horror), there's enough uphill to bring you back to reality. For me, every time we hit the small uphill sections they almost felt like huge mountains after getting used to all the downhill, but enough people passed me on those hills that I thought I might be in the minority. There's no doubt that the huge downhill sections helped a lot of people run their fastest half marathon time ever. I cut about a minute off my Personal Record from the 2010 Little Rock Half Marathon with a time of 1:32:11, which was 1st in the 55-59 age group and 24th overall. Honestly, I was just a little disappointed with my time since I've been running well lately and had dropped 10 pounds over the previous four weeks. I felt like there was a good chance for me to run ...

There weren't a lot of races around the Charlotte area this weekend, so I was excited when I found the Coon Dog Day 5k in Saluda, North Carolina. This sounded like it should be a lot of fun and it definitely met our expectations. This was the 48th annual Coon Dog Day celebration and I think the 5k race has been a part of the festivities for much of that time. Parking was a little bit of an issue but it was handled nicely by the volunteers. The race started and finished about a half mile from the parking lot so we walked to the starting line, but that's not too big of a deal of you're coming out to run a road race anyway. I liked the course but it was a challenging one. The first mile of the race was almost entirely uphill, followed by rolling hills in the second mile and, mercifully, a nice downhill finish in the last mile. I'm now in my fourth week of Weight Watchers and I'm not positive what my "official" weight is (my official weekly weigh-in is o...

We celebrated the 4th of July this year with a trip over to Columbus, North Carolina, which is at the bottom of the mountain as you leave Asheville on Interstate 26. Unfortunately, it's still on the edge of the mountains so there are all kinds of hills, which resulted in a slower race time for me (21:27) than a couple days ago in the much flatter Huntersville race. I also ran an 11-mile training run yesterday, and with no rest in between and the hilly course I expected to be slower. Still, I felt good and I'm still on track with my "comeback" although I was enticed by some of the homemade baked goodies after the race and even more junk at the 4th of July festival just a block away. This is a small-town race but a lot of fun, with cash for the overall male and female winners -- $100 for 1st place, $50 for second place, and $25 for third place. I was excited that Phyllis Neriah, from our running club (Gaston County Runners) ran in her very first 5k race ever and walke...

After last week's DNF debacle in Oakboro I was anxious to get back out to a race this weekend and put all of that behind me. This was our first race in two years at the HFFA (Huntersville Family Fitness & Aquatics) and I didn't really remember the course the race took, so it was nice to be reminded that it's a fairly flat course. It does go up and down some but it's mostly long, gentle slopes, and to make things even better it's both a downhill start and a downhill finish. I'm now in my third week since I've returned to the Weight Watchers program. The 10 pounds or so that I had gained since I did my best running back in the fall of 2009 had me running increasingly slower times. I had been trying to watch my diet a little bit, but that never works, and even with all of the running I managed to add about a half pound or so every month. In the three weeks of my new Weight Watchers program I've been pleasantly surprised to see that the new guideline...