A Run in Salamanca

Run from April 11, 2014

On Friday after our first full day at the ECPR Joint Sessions I did my second run in Spain. I’m normally a morning runner but a few trips ago, I started running in the post-conference and pre-reception/dinner time slot. There’s a six hour time change between Connecticut and Western Europe that makes getting up for a 6am run pretty rough. Plus, after sitting in a conference room all day, I’m often really ready to be outside and clear my head. An absolutely delightful development is that I’ve discovered a collection of running political scientists so if I can run with a colleague, I will, but today I ran alone.

For this run, I followed almost all of the rules I set out in the last entry. I was able to tell my roommate more or less where I was going and when I’d be back. I found a bike path that started in a park and then ran along the river.

Salamanca has a beautiful old city but the streets are very twisty and completely full of people in the early evening so the bike path was a much better option. I took my usual collection of stuff with me. For longer trips like this, I’ve just given up on the idea of jamming all my stuff into a suitcase that I can check. Somewhere I’ll list the ridiculous amount of running gear I took with me to Spain. It was much hotter than it’s been in Connecticut, around 70 when I started to run, so I was happy to have my sunglasses, my handheld water bottle and my hat.

I am currently training for a marathon so I was a little more ambitious with this run than I would have been otherwise. If I’m not on a training plan, I pretty much head out and run five miles. Following the training plan this week has been impossible because of travel, but the short mid-week runs were supposed to be more like 6 or 7 miles so I thought I’d aim for a bit longer than five, depending on how it was going.

Well, this turned out to be a fabulous run! I followed the bike path through a small park on the eastern side of the city and then down to the river and across an old bridge. I later discovered that bridge is really old. It’s Roman!

The river runs along the southern edge of the city and there are plenty of athletic facilities there full of people. Obviously, the people of Salamanca also think Friday evening is a great time to get outside and do something active. I saw people: walking, running, biking, fishing, roller skating, playing basketball, and playing handball. Plus lots of people strolling and picnicking.

 I even found a track:

I felt great on this run. It was much hotter weather than I’ve run in for months and months, but I could also tell that my mileage this week has been really reduced. Since running the half last Sunday, I had three days completely off from running and then did just about five miles in Madrid. Clearly my legs were ready to go and I was hitting a sub-10 min/mile pace most of the time without working for it even in the heat. I ran 3.5 miles out and back, taking lots of pictures along the way.