Neighborhood Running with Mal

I actually did 2 runs in my neighborhood with Mal on Thursday evening and Friday morning, which is awesome. So, I'm going to create sections for this post.

Thursday
Mal came over kind of late, which put us pretty much running in the dark. Okay, it wasn't dark like the Galveston night run, but the lights were on in the neighbhorhood making it somewhat creepy. I am glad that I had somebody to run with or I probably wouldn't have run at all. It was also somewhat chilly, which really put you in the mood for Halloween. Anyways, back to the run. We did a quick stretch and started our warm up walk. This time, I remembered to bring my watch so that I can track the time on our run. We started the walk behind the house and around the gazebo, before we started running when the clock hit 7:11 and we were on the sidewalk. We ran all the way to the stop sign at my regular turnaround point before we stopped to walk. The original plan was to keep on going passed the Outlet Mall, but Mal was ready to just go back to the house. We did the sidewalk roundabout run before stopping to walk and we only walked a little bit before running again. Instead of going straight back to the house, we did a little side run just to add more mileage to our run. This is normally a 1.4 mile run, but we made it probably 1.6.

When we got to my house, we planned to walk passed it around the gazebo and through the back way before going in for the night. However, when we got to the gazebo, I heard my dog barking something fierce, which meant she was outside and I didn't remember actually letting her outside (IT had come over and let her out, but couldn't get her back in). So, we cut the cool down walk short.

Friday
Mal and I got up to do the same run, but we wanted to do some yoga before we started. However, my On Demand system was not working (stupid weather), so we got to the run. As we were doing the warm up walk, we felt the drops of rain. At this point, it was not bad since we were headed in the opposite direction, but we kept an eye on it. And in fact, the weather kept dry for our entire run. When we hit the sidewalk and the time reached 9:49 (yes, I remembered my watch again), we started running. We were thinking that we were going to go passed the stopsign and by the Outlet Mall, but Mal wanted to turnaround. I totally respect it and we ran all the way to the stopsign before we stopped to walk. In fact, we kept on going to the next big sign. I wanted to go to the other stopsign before stopping, but Mal wasn't having any of that at all. So, we stopped for a quick walk and picked it back up at the stopsign. We did the same little side route to add some extra mileage. And this time, we had more runs.

There are 2 things that I noticed about these runs:
1.) Mal and I ran more on the second one. In fact we only stopped twice (for short time periods) during the second run (not including the cool down walk) whereas we stopped almost 4 times (much longer walks) on the first run.
2.) Since I have been running by myself quite a bit for the last couple of weeks, I have been working on my stride. It showed on our runs. I was considerably faster and I felt it. I could have easily made 1 mile in or under 10 minutes, which is a big deal for me. Normally, I would be lucky to run a mile in 10 minutes. I was easily 10-11 minutes a mile. Also, my legs look great, because working on your stride really works out your legs.

On a side note, Zach was reading this as I was writing and wanted me to write, "Zach is cool."