Running around the World: Recap

I’ve been pretty slack on blogging recently. I’ve been running, don’t worry, I just wasn’t finding interesting things to write about afterwards. A couple of weeks ago I ran a 15.5 miler before I left Antigua. It was a nice loop run that I started early in the morning. At mile 9 I ran past a gas station and took a pretty solid break to refuel with my Gu and buy some water. The whole thing was pretty slow and uninspired. The training program I am following has me running 3 times a week and cross training on the other days. I decided that this is probably a great program for decreasing a 5k or 10k time but doesn’t really feel like I am putting enough miles on my legs to then go out and run 20+. I decided that I wanted to continue to follow the speed drills but add a few more distance runs in every week. I left Antigua a few weeks ago for a couple of different jobs and haven’t been finding the time to write amongst it all. So here is a quick recap;

I sailed from Antigua to St. Thomas on a 130’ Wally. She is an amazing boat to sail and we hit 17 knots as we reached off between St. John and St. Thomas. Unfortunately, she was built as a Mediterranean day sailing/racing boat and doesn’t fare too well when she sails offshore. We were taking her to St. Thomas to get loaded onto a ship that will bring her back to the Med. We were in St. Thomas a week early in order to get extra weight off the boat and into a container. The crane that lifts the boat out of the water and on to the ship has a load capacity that is roughly the weight of the boat we were shipping. In order to avoid lots of limit alarms and annoying beeping we took off everything that wasn’t completely necessary to ship. We arrived on Thursday night and took the weekend off. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with a weekend off because I haven’t spent a lot of time in St. Thomas. In truth I avoid it because 1. It’s a shit hole and 2. There are so many other fantastic places to be around these parts. As luck would have it a friend of a friend was getting married and needed a +1 to go to the wedding with that weekend! Some very good friends of mine were on the guest list and many of the bride’s party went to UNH! I ran the morning of the wedding, did some work on the boat and got picked up by the groom and friends on the way to the ceremony. We stopped to fill the truck with ice, since it was a Caribbean wedding and you can never have too much, and headed to the venue. We had a great time dancing and not surprisingly, we all ended up in the pool with our party clothes on!

We got back to work on Monday. We had a pretty regular schedule, 8-5, and in preparation for 8 Tuff I ran a hill behind the marina every morning and again after work. The week went by pretty quickly and I bored the ferry for St. John Friday night after work. I wrote about the race already, so you can check it out in my other post.

After the race on Saturday I headed to Tortola to do a handover with the next boat I was joining. The crew is on holiday and I am looking after the boat and ticking off a small jobs list. While in Tortola I caught the gold medal hockey game with some pretty happy Canadians!

I took the early ferry back to St. Thomas on Monday in order to get the ship loaded later that night. Putting a 130’ super yacht on a 500’ super tanker is a pretty daunting and fascinating thing to do. We waited for the wind to die down with the sunset and began loading around 6pm. Everything went smoothly and sometime around 11 we headed back to the hotel and crashed into our beds.

On Tuesday I had told a friend I would help him sail his fast catamaran from the North Sound, Virgin Gorda, back to Tortola. I woke up early Tuesday, hopped back on the ferry to Tortola, drove out to Trellis bay and caught the North Sound Ferry. By noon we were hauling the main sail up on Soma and heading out of the channel. We had an awesome sail downwind that afternoon. It’s a funny coincidence that we don’t always sail in my line of work and it’s a real pleasure when we do!

On Wednesday I gave a friend a quick island tour of Tortola and sent him off on the ferry to enjoy the North Sound on his week off. With all this boat hopping and tour guiding, running got a little lost in the shuffle.

So, I ran 15 on the 10^th, hills every day last week and 8 Tuff last Saturday. Yesterday morning I got back in the saddle with 7.5 flat, fast miles. I ran an 8:12 pace and felt pretty good. This morning I went back to the training program with 6X1000m repeats working on speed. I averaged 4:40 per k but need to do the math to see what that is in miles. I am looking at running my first 20 miler (a week late) tomorrow. Yikes!

Sorry for the lengthy and long overdue post, here are some photos to make up for it.