Running With a Purpose

Running to do self errands always makes a workout easier to bear. Last Thursday I ran from home to my job’s human resources office to return an employee survey, then ran back home. It used to take me about 29 minutes to get there, but now it took me 32 minutes. On the way back home I added a few short spurts of what I consider speedwork nowadays. 32 minutes out plus 28 minutes back for a total of one hour of running, plus a short walk back home to cool down. That took care of two things that needed to be done that day: returning the survey and finishing the workout. After that, I had the rest of the day free since I was off from work.

Last Saturday, I finally did my 5 minute run/ 1 minute walk workout. The goal for that day was to find the location of a videogame store about a mile and a half away, because I wanted to check out a tennis game later, then circle the neighborhood up to the point where my ankle would start to bother me. Anyway, I wanted to run/walk for at least an hour. I found the videogame store pretty easily and just a few feet after I passed it, I saw a five dollar bill on the sidewalk. I picked it up, secured it in my sweater pocket and continued running. After five more minutes of running, I doubled back to see if I could find more money on the ground. Wishful thinking. All I found this time was a penny. So I kept on running perchance to find more treasures on the road well travelled: past CVS Pharmacy, past Walmart, and past the outer road of Long Beach airport, before turning back home, not finding anything else worth picking up from the street. Still, that day’s treasure was not so much about finding $5.01 on the street but that I was able to do a total of an hour and 24 minutes of the run/walk workout. The average pace of the run/walk was 9:49 minutes per mile, while the average pace of the run intervals was 9:24 minutes per mile. Not bad for an urban videostore hunt. Now, I just have to remind myself to look on the ground more often during future runs.