See below for what 1, 2, and 3 signify on this map.

(Sunday Paper, Year VIII, Issue 31)

My long run next Saturday is supposed to be a half marathon.

Back in 2022 when I did my second marathon training it worked out that the Wilmington Half Marathon fell right in the perfect window for my marathon training and I ran it as part of my training program.

This time, there was a marathon in Central Park on August 5 that was perfect…except for the fact that it was sold out.

So I did some thinking and came up with the great idea of doing my own Framingham Half Marathon.

Here’s what My Framingham Half Marathon will look like.

Let me give you a little mini-history of this idea. As with almost everything I do in my life in the summer, it partly revolved around the Mets.

Next week Kathy will be taking our oldest daughter on her first college tours, down in Washington, D.C. The plan was going to be the rest of us would meet them in Baltimore on Sunday, and we’d watch the Mets play the Orioles before coming back to New York…to watch another Mets game on Monday.

And it worked out even better when I saw that half marathon taking place on Saturday in New York City.

Then the half marathon was sold out and the Mets have stunk and I didn’t think they were worth traveling to Baltimore for so plans changed a little bit. (We’re still going to the game Monday night.)

So as I tried to plan out my upcoming runs I thought it might be fun to do something different with the half marathon distance, and I realized I should definitely tie it into my ‘Run Every Street in Framingham’ challenge.

So next Saturday I’ll do the full 13.1 in Framingham, and I’m going to try my best to do the full 13.1 miles on streets I haven’t run yet.

So that’s what I’m plotting out, and that’s what you see in the image above.

I think I’ve narrowed it down to three options for myself:

1) I haven’t done much in that top right corner of the map yet. If I park down by the high school I could theoretically loop through there and run a bunch of side streets and come back to the high school to return to my car. (The ‘coming back’ is important because I can’t count on Kathy to pick me up 13 miles away from my start point, since she’ll be 500 miles away.)

2) Similarly, if I start at the high school, I could just run a long way out and back on two main roads, without doing too many side streets. (I’m sure I’ll have to do some to pad the numbers.) But I should be able to go all the way downtown before I come back so that might give me the most length.

3) I accidentally didn’t drag the “3” to exactly where I wanted it on the map, but it doesn’t matter. It’s sitting on the road I was going to talk about - the third scenario involves the bigger roads - Route 9 and Route 30 - parts of the red line that runs east-west through the middle of the city that you can see there.

Likely the result will end up being some combination of the three, because what I’ve learned is 13.1 miles is a lot - and I’m probably underestimating how many streets I’ll actually have to run next Saturday.

So this week I’ll take the car out and try to clock 13.1 miles…or maybe I’ll even do it as part of my cross-training mid-week and measure it with the bike. (The bike might be better. I can run/bike [early in the morning, not during trafficky times!] down streets in directions I might not be able to drive down.)

But with the other running I’ll be doing this week, there’s a good chance I’ll be highlighting about 20 miles of new Framingham streets by next week’s Sunday Paper, which is very exciting.

And while we’re here, a reminder that I’m running the Chicago Marathon in October for Ronald McDonald House Charities, and you can contribute to my fundraising efforts at this link if you’d like. Maybe I’ll use the half marathon as a fundraising push this week as well.

What I’ve Been Enjoying

I guess maybe this is the best place to put this, which I haven’t written about yet: About a couple of months ago I was chosen as a Honey Stinger ambassador. It’s fun, because it’s kind of a nice validation of the running social media presence I’ve kept up. So if you see me talking about Honey Stinger on Instagram a lot lately, that’s why.

It’s also great because I genuinely like and want to use their products. (Haha. This sounds like a sell but I’m really just writing about what I use.) I started using their gels because other gels were upsetting my stomach and theirs was the best one I’d had, and I also ate their waffle as a good pre-run fuel. And then since I wanted to try out more products anyway I figured I’d try for the ambassador program, and now I’m trying everything. I really liked the Oat and Honey Bar, so now I eat one of those almost every time I run. And next week I’ll try out some of the energy chews, which I’m excited about. I don’t know that they’ll replace the gels, but I feel like I might like chews better than the gels. We’ll see.

Notes

*Last running note: Saturday’s long run was 15 miles and it went MUCH better than last week, thankfully. Back in my Saturday morning routine, which was good, better fueling/eating beforehand (remember, last week was when I ran at night), and listen, it wasn’t a great run, but it was so much better than last week it felt like a win. That’s another thing to look forward to with next week’s half marathon - it’s a mileage drop-down from the past two weeks.

*Oh, one more running note: Had my first friend run taking me around a neighborhood in Framingham I’d never been before this week. If you’d like to show me some new Framingham streets, just reach out! Running with someone always helps the miles pass along a little more quickly.

*Oh, OK, one more: I also ran into a person I only know from Instagram when I was running along the Esplanade in Boston Saturday. That’s fun. She recognized me first but I knew who she was right away. I’ll be honest - I was always worried about that happening because I don’t want to be rude by not recognizing someone, but I guess the brain is more capable than I give it credit for.

*Haha. I just realized how funny this is. First of all, my mom was showing some of my baby pictures to my girls this week and there was a fun one that I put there at the left which shows that I’ve always loved Winnie the Pooh. She was laughing about it because I posted my picture with Pooh from Disney World in last week’s post. But, I just also realized that between me with Honey Stinger and Pooh with regular honey we have a lot in common.

*I thought the Mets might start to make a late run because they hit a weak spot in their schedule and then they started to make trades and I thought maybe the team might rally around that and now they’re trading everyone and there’s no chance. What a disappointment this year has been.

*The social media links are below if you want to join the party of runners/Honey Stinger influencers. Thanks for following along!