First, let me state: I understand that I lived a privileged life. Not everybody has the opportunity to workout during the daytime on a Friday—I am super fortunate to have the flexibility and freedom to pursue my ultra running dreams at all, let alone to literally run off on a week day after a large part of the population has gone to work or school.
My husband works a nine to five from home. It’s flexible, but still a Monday through Friday weekday kind of gig. The benefits I receive from this working arrangement are vast.
He earns the income for our entire family of five. Including me. (Which also means that he finances my ultra running habit, for the record.)
Because he’s doing this from home, I also get to see him more often than I would if my partner commuted to a desk outside of the home. His availability changes daily, but in general I have several interactions with him over the course of a weekday—maybe even lunch. Occasionally we even knock out an errand together. Our kids benefit from this arrangement as well; they are all unschooled, and generally at home during the work week as well. (This is a whole ‘nother topic, but if you stick around, I’m sure it will come up again.)
Even when he’s not available, per se, he’s a grown-up that is present in our house.
If you’re an adult who is responsible for minors (that are not infants or toddlers—that would be a different story altogether!) and you are following along, you may have realized that my husband’s physical presence gives this mom a great deal of freedom. His ability to handle emergencies that come up combined with my children’s tween and teen status mean that I can come and go as I’d like.
Well, maybe not as I’d like, but far more than the average at-home-mom. I do have to make sure that members of my household have rides where they need to go and in general arrange my stuff around theirs, but my unschooled kids are far less scheduled than their peers, so basic calendar keeping skills do not make these responsibilities rocket science.
So I do my long runs on Fridays.
Most ultra runners do “back-to-backs” on weekends. This means that they do their longest run on Saturday, and a long run on Sunday. If you’re interested in the training benefits and what not, click on the link for a full explanation. You don’t need to know the full story, however, to understand that back-to-backs are time consuming.
Even before I hired a coach, I scheduled my long run for Friday, and my follow up not-quite-as-long-run on Saturday. When I started working with Jenny, I let her know this preference and she works my run programming accordingly. Friday long runs work for me because my longest training day is a day on which my kids are at home doing their own unschooly things, and my husband is busy working. I just didn’t want my key workout each week to collide with weekend family free day—if needed due to a kid’s sporting event, or another family plan, my back-to-back day can either get knocked out early, shortened, skipped, or rescheduled. Most weeks, though, Patrick joins me on my Saturday trail excursion. And generally our tween and teens don’t mind sleeping in.
Now that I’ve been doing this for a little bit, we also know that we generally don’t schedule stuff for Friday mornings. If Patrick is available to give someone a ride somewhere, great, but let’s not sign up for a class that meets at 9 am on Friday every week please. So sometimes their stuff gets scheduled around mine, if I’m honest.
Today’s Friday long run assignment was sixteen miles.
There’s a lot to think about/observe/notice over the course of sixteen trail miles, so I’ll limit these Friday finds to just three:
Old bottles.
I found this interesting because they were clearly placed trailside in a row. I was on this trail both Monday and Tuesday—no bottles. So I’m thinking that they were found by an off trail explorer who wanted to show them off to other trail users? I’m wondering if they’ll still be there next week.
Snake.
I’m fortunate that this is not a daily—or even weekly—thing. The vast majority of times, I run off shrieking before I even have time to identify any snake features, let alone take a picture of it. But this guy was pretty little, moving very slowly, and on a wide section of trail. No last minute leaping or frantic running the other way required. But here’s the thing, no matter what type or size of snake I see, once I see it, every snake-like stick or root that I spy after that becomes a snake.
A snake sighting is pretty much a guarantee that the remainder of my trail miles will be adrenaline spiked. Luckily for me, today’s snake was spotted less than two miles from the end of my run. Phew!
This guy.
We didn’t do the whole run together, but I both started and ended my Friday long run with my oldest. This is him taking off at the end. I’d already met my running goal for the day, and he had less than half a mile to go to make it to his: thirteen miles! This was a longest run for him today, and I am so honored to have shared a few of his miles. This guy is training for a 25k this fall—not a small feat for a 15 year old . . . but I suppose this is where our unschooling life also affords *him* some training time that other students his age might not get.
You’d think we could find some other ways to squander all of our free time, but get this: he’s coming with me on my back-to-back in the morning!