Morning Flyers

As I head into the summer, I will have to miss more and more of the Flyer group runs that I have come to rely on. I am a morning runner, and I never voluntarily miss either the Tuesday 6AM speed work, or the Thursday 6AM 6 mile group run.
With a young child at home, and my wife away until August, I'll have to find other times to run. I'll write another time about how I'll solve this problem, but today I'm thinking about how much the Flyers morning runs have done for me.
I started running with the morning group in January, and I had a hard time keeping up. After meeting these wonderful people, I was determined to get into shape, just so that I could spend time with them. The age range was huge, and I got sage advice from some and a friendly kick in the rear from others. This is a truly inspiring group of people.
I was immediately driven to show up for each run. The 6 mile runs were long for me, and the speed work was challenging, but somehow I had the feeling that I had to show up. In addition, I had to run other times in the week in order to get into shape to keep up with the group. Suddenly, my weekly mileage was a done deal.
How did it pay off? Since January, when I started with the group, I have dropped 20 pounds, and 95 seconds/mile from my 5 mile race pace. The speed work has definitely made a difference. Most of all, I'm even more excited about running then before.
For a while now, my friends in the group have been telling me that I've been racing too much. I'm finally going to take their advice and break from racing for a while. I'm going to focus on training for longer runs. My first target is the NY Half Marathon on August 5th. OK, I might sneak in another race before that, but I'm going to focus on bringing up the weekly mileage and improving my long race training.
After that, my wife will be home and I'll be back out in the mornings -- see you out there!