The Chase Is On

My husband, Todd, and I run together.  Sort of.  He is much quicker than I am, but we tend to run the same distances as one another each day.  The exception to that is if one of us has an injury and needs an easier or shorter run.  And our distances may vary when he is working on the road and doesn't have access to safe running routes. 

Since I found it too demoralizing to watch him run away from me when we are starting out we devised a system to make it feel like we are running together, yet plays well to our competitive natures.  We compete for speed, improvement and distance.  And we are both statistics geeks so we use a tracking software called RunLog Deluxe.  It has been a terrific tool for tracking running and riding activity, distance on shoes, pace, speed for a given distance...all sorts of interesting stats about each and every run, walk, or ride.

Because we have very good information about our experiences on each of our runs we pick a run...yesterday it was the 5.8 mile loop... and then, based on how we're feeling, make our best guess at our finish time.  Over that distance the difference was 4 minutes.  So I take off running, Todd waits 4 minutes and then comes after me.  I spend the entire run trying to stay ahead of him, he spends it trying to catch me.  Both of us, of course, hoping to do as well, or better, than we predicted.  It makes it a lot of fun while still providing a lot of support for one each other's running efforts.  And it is an adaptation that will work for any 2 (or more) abilities.  Try it with your running partner(s)!

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