Running Mates

I have been bugging my boyfriend to start running with me for a long time now. He isn't really against running, but he doesn't obsess over things they way I do sometimes. I have been trying to talk him in to training for and running a half marathon with me, and he knows that I want to eventually run a marathon together. When I am visiting him on a weekend that I need to run, he always runs with me, but he also acts as if he doesn't really want to go. I got him to run my first ever organized race with me. It was a 5k, and he was pissed because we got passed by two power walkers. I asked him to do a training run with me a few times before my last half, and he was like, "Uh, you have to run 7 miles...I haven't run since you made me go with you last month...ok." And then he ran 7 miles without stopping. I would have died.

I quickly remembered today, when we set out on a run with one of his friends, what actually happens when we run together. I am always reading articles about how you should run at a leisurely pace, which means you should be able to carry on a conversation. I don't run and carry on conversations. If you ask my friends and family, they could tell you that I am a fairly irritable person by nature. They would also tell you that my boyfriend is the complete opposite. He always comments when we run together that I am a surprisingly angry person when I run considering that it is supposed to produce endorphins.

You see, running makes him instantly hyper. He is like a kid who ate so much candy that he starts doing stupid stuff like snorting the pixie stix. You know what kind of kid I am talking about. He starts making blinker noises while signaling with his hands. He does a dumb circling thing to me as we run. Today, I had the joy of seeing him do a figure 8 around his friend and myself. And he would carry on a deep philosophical conversation as we ran if I would keep up my end of the conversation. I just silently keep running. Mostly.

The other thing I forgot about was the issue we always seem to have when it comes to mapping a route. When he visits me at my house, I have tons of routes in various legnths mapped out that I already run all the time. He obviously does not because he mostly runs only when I am there. I love mapmyrun.com. It can be super awesome, but not if Matt uses it. He seems to make the craziest loop possible when mapping a run. I usually say something like, "Matt, don't forget you have to memorize this." He always assures me that he's got it down, and usually points out that he lives in the town where the route is being mapped, and he knows his way around. I am assuming that you can already tell where this is leading...

One day this fall, he led us off on a run down a road where crazy construction was going on. He still made us turn down the "road" even though the street was torn up, and the sidewalks were destroyed. It was seriously awful. Today was even better. At one point, Matt informed us that we needed to go on a street that didn't actually intersect with the one we were on. In his mind before we left, the run he had mapped would work, but he apparently forgot that the "intersecting" road we were going to take was actually a bridge that crossed above it. When he realized that we weren't going to be on the right road, he quickly recalculated and told us to follow him. As he jaunted across the street, I followed questioningly. He assured me that we were in fact going to make the best possible remedy for this situation by running on the railroad tracks! We really ended up walking that part, but we continued down the tracks until it met a street that intersected with the street we were on before we got on the tracks!! I was, and still am, seriously baffled.

All in all, I love him to death. There is never a dull moment, but I have decided that I will be planning out all runs from now on!