I've been doing conferences for Intel about 6 years now, and every time people say "you should run with Joe" I've e-mailed 'Joe' before but we never hooked up and actually ran. Well, on Saturday I met Joe for the first time and we decided to meet for a run this morning. Joe English is his full name and he's a pretty good runner, he even has an online training site running-advice.com just going off marathon times we figured we were pretty equivilent runners, although he has a lot more experience than me. He's in the nice hotel, instead of the Vendor hotel where I stay so I met him at his at 6:00, we ran to the park. We got to the park and he said "lets do some speed work" Umm! OK, really who goes running with someone they just barely met and says lets do speed work? He wanted to do 2 sets of the 3K course, I told him I didn't really want to go faster than 6:00 pace, he said that was OK for the first lap and took off, I stayed with him but at the .5K mark I looked down and my Garmin said 5:22 pace, I said, or we could do 5:20 pace if you want. He slowed down to around 5:50, I stayed with him until 2K then he slowly got away. He waited for me, maybe 30 seconds at the finish line, we jogged to the start again and he said he was going to do the next loop faster, I told him he'd be going alone :) I went out at about 6:00 pace, stayed there until my foot started hurting and then slowed to 6:40 pace to finish. It was really fun to find someone to run with, hopefully he doesn't do speed work everyday, I think it was probably good for me to do a shorter run with speed this week, I would have just ran easy all week if someone wasn't pushing me.
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