What I've Been Training For...

According to my RunKeeper profile page, my first race is less than a day away - the Tulsa Zoo 5k Run.

I'm nervous about it for two reasons.

First, it will be my first non-solo run - I'm running it with my 10-year-old son, who is in his second year of running 5k races. Not to mention, my first-ever timed race...

Second, it will the first time I've run any distance at all without my faithful companion, Zeus, at my side.

Zeus and I have been walking and running together since mid-March, and I admire his patience with me. He is just over a year old now, a Doberman-Lab mix that only has two speeds - fast and faster. When we walk together (which we did last night), his walking gait is slightly faster than mine, which has the effect of pulling me along - we average sub-16-minutes walking miles at that rate.

However, when I run, my stride is too fast for his walking gait but not fast enough for his full on run. He has no gallop mode, so he's either dragging me forward or backwards when we run. To his credit, he's a great sport about it, and he gets his revenge - every time we pass a squirrel or rabbit (we run at 5am, when there's plenty of wildlife around and about), he jerks me in that direction in the hopes that one day I'll follow or the leash will break.

To digress a moment, we saw our first possum this morning. It was a sight to behold, a cat-sized gray blob scurrying across the grass, headed for the nearest tree. To Zeus, it must have looked like a rabbit covered in dog food and leftover gravy, because he totally freaked out over it - he pulled me off the trail, and it took a minute or two before we could both regain our composure and move along.

So tomorrow I'll get up early like I usually do, but our run will instead be a walk through our neighborhood to warm up for the 5k. Then I'll put him back in the yard, pack up the wife and kids (she and the other two kids are doing the one mile Fun Run), and head for the zoo.

Then Zeus and I will resume our daily routine on Sunday.

-Steve