Skaters, Door County, Paul, 20 Miles, etc.

This morning I attended the World Sprint Speed Skating Championships . . . sort of. I went to the Pettit Center to run my 20 miler this morning at it just happen to be the first day of the International Event. The announcer mentioned all the countries where participants were from and I remember hearing Canada, Italy, Finland, Norway, Germany, Netherlands, England, Russia and of course, the USA. Masters would consist of skaters over 40 years old.

While they skated, I ran lap after lap after . . . 73 total laps. I stayed slow most of the time with miles in the lower to mid 9:00's. After 15 miles, my legs were getting quite tired. I am not sure if it was from the great tempo run I had this week or if it was still from the marathon 2 weeks ago. I knew I was close to finishing so I kept p the spirits and trudged along. With about 10 laps to go, I found myself running the same pace as another guy so I caught up to him and started a conversation. Greg is training for Boston and is a former track coach so we had a nice chat for about 20 or so minutes.

I finished, I was tired, my legs were spent so I went home, took a shower and then took the car in for regular maintenance at Firestone. The girls and I also watched the movie "Up" tonight. We had not seen it. It was cute and good. A little sad at times but I would recommend as a good rental.

I posted a few days ago about a gentleman named Paul who is 86 years old and has run 100+ marathons, ran the Icebreaker Indoor Marathon, and also lives in my city. Little did I know I had more in common with him that I knew. Turns out Paul and I are members of the same church. Our church is not a small church so I did not recognize him during the race. But then again, when I am in church, I don't look around and ask myself "Is that 86 year old guy a marathon runner?" I will definitely look for him in the future and introduce myself to him. I wonder if he attends the same service I do?

Here is another bit of interesting things to me. I mentioned before I use Site Meter to see how many people go to this blog site and I can see where the come from. It is very interesting to see where everyone comes from and how the found me. Well, this past Thursday was the highest amount of people to come to my site and read. I checked the tab "By Referrals" and saw that a bunch of them came from an email site. I know I did not send my site address out to anyone so I wondered who did? after a little searching it turns out that my site was linked to a mass email sent out about the Door County Half Marathon. I ran the race last year in early May and posted my race report here. I guess they liked what I had to say (I did like the race) so they linked it saying "One Runner's In-depth 2009 Race Report - One 2009 runner posted a blog with a detailed report about his training for the race and his Door County Half Marathon Experience." I had no idea they were going to do this but it is pretty cool though.

I ran a total of 35.3 miles this week with 20 today so I am going to take tomorrow off and look for Paul at Church. It is only 4 weeks from my next adventure in the state of Georgia. I have 1 more long run planned for next weekend.

Happy Running!