Running in Jacksonville

I am running and writing from Jacksonville, Florida.  It's only a 2.5 hour drive from Orlando, but it's still fairly new.  I am helping my mother.  She is going through medical evaluations at the Mayo Clinic.  I have been attending classes and accompanying her to tests.  Luckily, I have sisters that have been doing the same thing, so we have been able to share time with her.

Coincidentally, I heard some of the people in my running group talk about racing in Jacksonville and visiting their local running store 1st Place Sports.  There's actually 4 of them in the area.  Since I ended up in Jax this week, I figured I would check it out.  I looked them up on the internet and they were about 8 miles away, but only like 3 or 4 turns on the map.  I also saw on their website that they have group runs at 6pm from their Baymeadows shop.  I asked about it, but they said that people rarely show up, so I tried to make other plans.

Before I left, I picked up some new socks.  My favorites right now are Balega brand, so that's what I got.  Since my shoes are gray, black, and yellow, I got yellow socks, black socks, gray socks, and universal white socks.  They have a buy 3 socks and get 1 free, so I had to take advantage of the offer.

As a backup running plan, I asked if they knew of any public tracks in the area since I normally do speedwork on Tuesdays.  One of the clerks told me about a public track at the University of North Florida.  That was also very easily located from their Baymeadows store.  I drove over there and they have a full size track and stadium, but that was only available for the track team.  Right next to it, there is a soccer field and a 400 meter track.  That was it.  We ate some lunch and headed back to our hotel room.  I planned on running in the afternoon, but that idea was dropped by storms.

Since I missed my workout yesterday, I definitely needed to run today.  I was still very limited in time and I could only run around noon.  This meant that I couldn't drive to the UNF track and get back in time for the next appointment.  This also meant that I had to run 96 degree weather and no shade.  I didn't know it at the time I started, but I also didn't have a source of water until I was finished.

I started by running along the sidewalks of the Mayo Clinic sidewalk and nine minutes later, I ended up at a dead end road.  Time to stretch.  My best option was to run on this road and looping part of the parking lot.  This was almost like running my freshman year in high school.  We didn't have a track built, so we had yards measured in the parking lot and that's where we ran.  It was odd, but sometimes fun because of it.

Since I had no way of measuring distances and only knew how much time I had available, I decided to run 1 and 1's.  I ran 1 minute hard (somewhere between mile speed and 5k speed) and alternated with 1 minute of jogging.  I planned on running 10 sets like this for a total of 20 minutes.  I ran strong while I did, but the heat took its toll on my body and I only got through 6 sets (12 minutes).

At least I ran.  It always makes me feel better.