Sewanee Fun Run

This weekend we visited Sewanee for Reunion and Homecoming, which included something called an "Alumni Fun Run".  Not being an alum, I was nervous about there being room for me in it.  Maybe they only have enough numbers for registered graduates?

Ha.  Turns out that a fun run is not a race, at least not this fun run.  I asked a woman the day before how to register, and she said to show up.  I asked when; pre-registration is often an hour or so before the starting time, right?  She said to just come "around 8:00, maybe a few minutes before to get a snack."  Hmm...

Saturday I showed up around 7:45 at the (beautiful sandstone)* Alumni house.  There was an off-leash lab frolicking, several runners in various levels of winter wear, a lovely spread of coffee, water bottles, muffins, and fresh fruit, as well as a man in a tweed jacket with his Great Dane, but no giant clock, packet pick-up, not even a starting line.  Around 8:00 a woman told us to follow two running professors to the cross and back, about 3 miles.  Then we were off!  

My Garmin died about a week ago, and the new one will not arrive for another week, so I was clockless.  We started as a group running down the middle of the street.  Did they block off the roads for us?  Were there cops protecting us from traffic?  Not exactly; it's just that easy to run in the road on a Saturday morning.  I met some nice ladies and then sped up to catch the quicker people.  No watch, no real sense of the distance, no worrying about placing or PRs or anything.  It was pretty nice.  The run began on the road, switched to trail, and the turnaround was the Sewanee Cross.  Simply gorgeous.  Then we headed back on the road and ended downhill back to the Alumni house.  The campus is stunning, especially in the fall, and the sometimes foggy Sewanee sky was clear blue.

I have absolutely no clue how far or fast I ran and I'm pretty sure I don't care.  I'll call it 3 miles and 25:00 in my log, but that's probably too slow and too short.  The important thing is how nice it was to run for the sake of running.  I could only gauge my effort on how my legs, lungs, and mind felt, and I haven't done that in a long time.

* Thanks Jason!