On Friday night, Meredith and Scott invited Raffi and I to go sailing with them. I’ve always wanted to sail and we jumped on the opportunity. Every Friday night, the St. Petersburg Yacht Club has a race. It’s pretty low key and there’s beer involved, so how can you argue with that?
Raffi and I basically served as counterweights while Scott steered and Meredith and DJ (wo)manned the lines. It was a great time and we finished 2nd in our class – mostly thanks to the master tactics of Scott and DJ, but I like to think my hard core leaning played a minor role at least. On the way back to the dock, Scott let me steer!
This weekend was the first run with a group that I organized on meetup.com. I was expecting 9 people and 6 showed up. I thought that was pretty good for a meetup.com group. There’s definitely been flakiness with Meetup groups in the past and flakiness tends to increase when the Meetup is at 6 on a Saturday morning. Scott was one of the people who flaked. Apparently, we stayed up too late and had too many beers after sailing.
Meredith showed up and so did Sandy, who’s on the Disney Wine & Dine 1/2 marathon team. I brought Alice and two other guys I had never met before (Gabe and Adriano) were also there. We set off at a 10 minute mile pace and cruised pretty well through the first 1.5 miles. Sandy fell off the back because of shin splints and Adriano appeared to have some knee problems – most likely because he was running in basketball shoes!
I convinced them both to turn back for a 3 mile run, then worked hard for about a half mile to catch the rest of the group. Gabe was jamming out to his headphones while Alice set an ever faster pace. Meredith and I ran in silence, just trying to recover from the previous night. We ended up finishing in about 55 minutes – nothing special, but a nice easy run on a beautiful morning!