Baltimore Overlap

Best friend CB and I headed down to Charm City on Friday to visit with two of our favorite people. We’ve been going down to Baltimore–via bus, train or car–for over ten years now every few months, to spend several decadent hours of good food and conversation with DM and LM. A typical visit includes dinner with lots of wine, sleeping on the couch, and pancakes and eggs for breakfast. This visit was, as they have been recently, especially treasured as DM is just about to start a new treatment for Parkinsons Disease, with which he is afflicted. (More on this later; some of you may remember I am running the Flora London Marathon in 2009 to raise money for the Michael J. Fox Foundation.) 

Friday night was a bit odd–I left for an hour and a half, all snazzed up in Diane von Furstenberg, to attend a cocktail party for work. This coincidental overlapping of events meant that I had a three-glass head start with the sauvignon blanc. 

The next morning, I was groggy–we all broke our bedtime–but I did make it up and out to run 5 miles past the neighborhoods surrounding my alma mater, Loyola College. Our friends live on North Charles Street, midway between Johns Hopkins University and Loyola, so I just ran up Charles Street until little G told me I’d hit 2.5 miles, and turned around. This area is so familiar to me from the driver’s seat of my car. However, passing beautiful Tudor homes, Loyola’s campus and rec buildings, all the way up to Charlesbrook development on foot was a preferable way to move through the stomping grounds of my coed years. The barely-turning leaves and clear blue skies, light auto traffic, and dozen or so other runners set the tone for the easy out-and-back, which ended up at 5.3 miles in 50:48. 

Another fitting overlap: while I was trotting up Charles, thousands of other runners were charging through downtown for 26.2 miles of glory in the Baltimore Marathon.