Keeping All The Balls In The Air

I finally paddled out toward the line up at 8:10 Saturday morning. North Florida surfers were being graced with another strong pulse of swell energy from the second distant Atlantic hurricane within a week. I barely caught the hurricane surf from a week ago and it was looking like I would get skunked again. My workload and poor scheduling habits put a huge dent in my favorite past time activity. Friends were questioning if I really even cared about surfing anymore. I mean, if you’re a surfer it’s sacrilegious to miss good hurricane surf. Unfortunately, that’s what was happening.
Saturday morning I faced two options.

1) Get up early, head across town and run a quick 5 miles with the group and an even “quicker” individual timed mile (mm).
or
2) Get up early, head to the beach and surf fun, clean, chest and head high hurricane swells.

I created an option three.
Run fast and race back to the beach for surf.

It turned out to be a good plan.

The Magic Mile was back on our schedule for Saturday. I prefer to think of it as the Sadistic Mile.
Curiously, only a third (maybe half) of our training group showed up. Short distance runs create problems for some of the folks that plan long weekend runs. I understand this challenge but I also have to wonder if it’s the S&M that keeps them away. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s an unnatural thing to do to the body. But it is a necessary evil. Without pain there is no gain.

My MM was 5:50.
This mile time is not much faster than my first MM but I feel I’m getting stronger in my distance runs.
We will run a 5k race next weekend and then it’s a twenty mile run the following weekend. (scratches head) Yep, we are running twenty miles!

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The Donna Hicken Foundation

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The Kurtis Group
425 8th ave. n.
Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250