Running Buddy
Training with friends has countless benefits. At least once a week I meet up with my favorite running partner and friend Courtney. You might have heard me mention her before, we’ve trained for many races together. We hold each other accountable for runs every week but we can also be a bad influence occasionally when we both take off from running.
Every Monday or Tuesday we meet up for a workout or easy run, whatever we’re in the mood for that day. Then again towards the end of the week we meet up again. On a typical day, we text each other around noon to see if we’re both free to meet up. It’s always last minute that we decide to run, she takes running clothes to work just so she has it. I live 5 min from where she works, and I get off work a little before her. We meet up just before 5pm and we never know where we’re going to meet until 4:40. I think sometimes we both get in our cars and start driving before we even know where we’re going. It’s nice we both just fly by the seat of our pants, it works best for us.
Here Comes The Excuses
When we text each other around noon we come up with ways to convince ourselves we don’t need to do a workout. We have a whole list of great excuses, some are excuses we use during our workouts, here are a few.
“It’s too hot today”
“I drank too much coffee and forgot to drink water”
“I ate ice cream while I was waiting for you to finish up work, which was only 20 min ago”…….same goes for chips lol 😂
“It’s my time of the month, I’ll try my best to do the workout but no promises today”
During the workouts we tend to say, “Well this is a good start, let’s call it a day”
Or “My legs feel ok but I’m out of breath, I don’t think I can continue”
Occasionally we do get some good workouts in, but it’s been some time since we’ve done one without any excuses. During our usual, easy runs, we like to talk, and talk, and talk. The run goes by much quicker this way. We’re known to run races the same way, lots of chit chat. We talk the entire run so that we don’t get bored and so we forget how far we’ve run. During 5k’s people know us for our talking, they know we’re about to pass them before they even see us.
Run The Way You Train
We once ran a marathon together and talked for the first 20+ miles. Courtney took off from the pace group we started with and I didn’t want to go. So we said our goodbyes and she took off. That was around mile 4, after running for 3 min without her I decided I rather run faster than not talk the rest of the way. I picked up my pace and caught up to her. She probably could have run even faster but didn’t because she wanted to talk too. After all, that’s how we did our training runs.
Anyways, on the days we don’t run together, we text each other to see how far we each went…..or didn’t go. It’s great to have someone else hold you accountable. I do have another dedicated runner friend to help me get out 6 days a week, my sister. It’s a little more difficult to get her to run because she has a 1yr old and we always need to find flat trails to push the stroller on. But I never mind pushing, my niece seems to enjoy it! Hopefully she’ll be my next running partner, she just doesn’t know it yet. 😁