CAST OF CHARACTERS

This blog makes me feel like an author writing a story. And like any good story, you need a cast of characters. I thought I’d give a little more background into Eric, Jim and Debbie.

Eric and I “worked” together at my last company. We did not actually work together; in fact, neither of us did much work. Hmm, that’s probably why I got laid off (that’s another story). Eric has since left the company too, retiring at the ripe old age of 46. Anyway, at first, we both ran over our lunch hour, but not together. Then we bumped into each other at a 5k, got to talking and eventually started running together over lunch. At the time Eric was probably a low-19 5Ker on about 40 miles of easy running a week. Now he’s a sub-18 5Ker and I’d like to think all my hounding about increasing his mileage and adding speed work has contributed to his improvement.

Eric is very friendly and easy to talk to. At a race “up north” last spring he met Jim. If you’ve been following along, you know that Jim is the super stud whose goal is to set a state record for 60 year olds - every weekend. For those of you familiar with the WAVA age-grading calculator, Jim’s time from Saturday calculates to a 32:20. Plus, he is the nicest, most humble state record holder you’d ever want to meet.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Eric, it’s don’t be afraid to go up and talk to someone at a race. Okay, last summer it took me 2 races to get up the courage but I eventually talked to Debbie. Both races were 4 milers and it was all I could do to hold off this first woman overall. While talking, we found out we live about 2 miles from one another. Deb is bubbly, full of energy and always smiling.

So what do you do during the summer with 4 people (2 retirees, a substitute teacher and someone who’s laid off) who run similar times? You form a training group and try to run each other into the ground. All right, it wasn’t that dramatic. But we did do a few track workouts together, some “easy” days and some races. Looking at the 4 of us, you’d never guess that we trained together. “Unfortunately” I’m back in the work-world and won’t be able to participate in our weekly track workouts this year.