Five miles

It was inevitable that there would be days when I'd stay up too late and do too much the night before, and 6:00 am Sunday morning would come way too early. This was one of them. I managed to get up and to the park on time anyway, and despite the cold weather and the sleepiness got in a good run. Five miles down the Great Highway and back -- it's amazing to me that in just a few weeks I've already gotten to the point where five miles doesn't seem that far to run.

We run in pace groups named after famous marathoners. Ours is Christine Clark. When we all admitted that we'd never heard of her, we were given the "assignment" to make up all the silly and outrageous stories we could think of for who she might be (I will only pass along one: it was suggested that Christine Clark was Rush Limbaugh's drag name), and then go home and find out who she really is. So I've been surfing the net and discovered that Christine Clark is in fact a 38-year-old pathologist and mother of two from Anchorage, Alaska, who won the 2000 U.S. Olympic Trial with a personal record of 2:33:31, and came in 19th in the marathon at the Sydney Olympics. She's also won the 1995 Seattle Marathon and the 1995, '98, and '99 Anchorage Mayor's Midnight Sun Marathon. I am suitably impressed.