I ran about three miles with my friend Terriann on Monday night under the big shade trees at Reed Park while her daughter went to a gymnastics lesson and her son hung out with Ron at the playground.
Exact distances are hard to calculate out there, as the walking trail is labeled as a half-mile loop but actually falls short of that distance. We hadn’t run together in a long time, and for a variety of reasons (most having to do with weather, injuries, and various other lame excuses), we are both terribly out of shape and are thus running about the same pace these days. It was a relatively cool evening, so we managed seven laps at a relaxed pace, took walk breaks when we felt like it, and brought each other up to date on all the latest news from our respective spheres of influence.
We all went to dinner at Ollie’s afterward. The kids got a kick out of the model trains, and I got a kick out of the kids — especially Corbin, who ran out of things to dip in his gravy and finally just gave up and went after it with a fork.
Ron thinks he’s no good with kids because he doesn’t know how to talk to them, but that’s actually an asset, not a liability, because he doesn’t dumb anything down or use that insufferable I’m-talking-to-a-little-kid tone with them. He just talks to them the same way he talks to grownups — which is exactly how kids like for grownups to talk to them. If I’d met someone like Ron when I was little, I would have thought he could walk on water, because I absolutely hated grownups who talked down to me, but I loved the ones who respected me enough to talk to me like an equal.
Box score:
Miles run Monday: 3
My total miles: 10.1
Next scheduled run: 3 miles with Terriann tomorrow, probably at Reed Park.
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 