I’m in Dallas this week for a multi-day company-wide meeting, which means I got to run with Steve again for the second time in two weeks. He was staying at a different hotel than I was, and my original plan had been to head down on foot to meet him (since I was wanting a couple more miles than he was), but I calculated that due to trail curveture I’d be tacking another six miles onto whatever we ended up doing together. No thanks; I ended up driving down and meeting him in the parking lot at 6AM.

Our first 1.3 miles were spent just trying to get somewhere we could run. As you can see from the map, we lapped the parking lot (and the next door parking lot) trying to get to a quiet street, then ended up having to move to the US-75 frontage road, walking a good portion of it due to traffic and rough terrain, before reaching Royal which let us cut over to the White Rock Creek Trail heading South. We stayed on the trail for about three miles before turning around and heading back, giving us a good, solid six miles of exercise not including our warmup. Our pace was conversational for the most part, but we kept a decent effort nonetheless.

The last running mile was done at an 8:00 average pace, with a pretty smooth acceleration throughout (so figure about an 8:30 start and a 7:30 finish). We ended up walking the final mile back to the hotel just due to a combination of weariness (at first) and increased traffic forcing us to stay in the rough median on the frontage road. With Chicago and NYC looming, neither one of us really needs a twisted ankle at this point. Not a fantastic workout, but not bad either considering that this was purely a “get the miles in” effort.

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