Quality Time With My Daughter

"It's been such a long time" Long Time: Boston

It's been 9 long days since my last run. Crappy weather, getting ready for Christmas, sunset at 4:20 p.m., the list of reasons goes on and on why I waited so long to run. Prior to running, I did as I always do, and checked WTNH.com. I discovered it was an actual temperature of 35 degrees, and also a "feels like" temperature of 35 degrees. Cold, but a refreshing kind of cold. My daughter Stephanie actually agreed to run with me, which was a surprise since she has a cold weather rule that she doesn't run outside unless it's 40 degrees or more. We both agreed that 6 miles sounded good, with my logic being that I needed to run a mile for the amount of days in a row I have "oinked" on Christmas cookies. I'm not sure what her reasoning was, nor did I care since she was in agreement with me about the distance we would run. I let her pick the route, and she chose a new road route that started and ended at our house. Since neither one of us owns a Garmin, or any other high tech satellite technology gizmo, we use http://www.usatf.org/to plot our courses. This particular course was one she created one day by just running around Cheshire for a certain amount of time, and then using, you guessed it, www.usatf.org to see what distance it was. Lo and behold, it was 6.11 miles. Okay, now that I've cleared that up, I have to say that I enjoyed running with Steph. Not that she talks a lot as we run. Actually, most of the time I do the talking for the first mile or so, get very little responses from her, then decide to shut up and allow her and myself to enjoy our individual music and the beautiful day. After all, it's not the conversation that's important. We can talk anytime. It's the joy of spending quality father-daughter time together out on the open road doing something we both enjoy. Today's run was, as I like to say, fun. Well, at least the first 40 minutes were. The last 18:51 wasn't so fun. My legs were definitely feeling the effects of an 8 day layoff. Heavy and tight are two words that come to mind to describe how they felt. But hey, I ran, I spent quality time with my daughter, and it was.....FUN! Total time was 58:51, or a slow and steady 9:38 per mile average pace.