Running with a Group

Last night, I went on my very first Wednesday evening run with Reston Runners / Potomac River Running (PRR).  At the PRR Reston store, at 6:30 pm on Wednesdays, the store and the club offer a 50 minute run on the W&OD trail. I haven't run with Reston Runners in years, although I do belong, and I've never started a run at PRR.  I also realized that I don't run with a group very often, but I'm getting ahead of myself.


The pre-run was good.  Since I knew zero people there, I didn't talk much, but I noticed a lot of race shirts (rule #1: on a group run, flaunt the fact that you have done some races!).  There was a representative from Mizuno there with a raffle, so I entered my name. I couldn't / wouldn't enter any other personal information about myself, that was good :)  


Then we started.  I immediately started running at my running pace, but apparently others started running at a warmup pace (I guess that's rule #2 about group running...).  It didn't matter too much, as different groups started running their own paces.  There were two people who really just took off, running what had to be a sub-8 minute mile.  I hung out in the second group, but took the hills pretty hard, so I went ahead of them.  A few of them caught up and passed me at an intersection (we lost about 2-3 minutes waiting there), and they never looked back.  I kept my pace up pretty well though -- I think I was running a 8:20-8:25 average, with some 1/2 miles splits at around an 8:00 minute/mile.  That's the big thing about group running, I tend to run faster than when I'm by myself.  However, I'm not sure if that is a good or bad thing.


At 25 minutes, I turned around, and started back.  For some reason, I got it my head that I needed to be back at 45 minutes (instead of 50), so every time I looked at my watch, I thought I was behind, so I sped up a bit.  With about a mile to go, I realized that I was not tracking correctly, but by then, I knew I was doing a negative split, so I kept it up.  In the end, I did a negative split by about a minute, so 49 minutes overall.  I'm guessing I did an 8:20 or 8:25 pace overall, so I"m guessing that I did 5.88 miles (since I knew I ran for 49 minutes).  Since I didn't have the Garmin, it was guess work, but the W&OD trail is marked very half mile, so this was close.


At the end of the run, I stretched my calves and heel as much as I could while waiting for the raffle.  I didn't win anything, but I did notice a cool marathon training shirt sold at the store, so I'll need to remember that.


Will I do it again? Yes.  I enjoy it, but need to remember two things when running with a group: 1) wear a race shirt; and 2) wear clean clothes (see this post for more info on this).  Note: I *did* follow #2 last night, but it's always a good thing to remember...