I am chanelling the Easter bunny

My neighbor Dennis was out on his front porch this morning playing with his grand kids. As I walked my dogs around the corner of his property I could see a hundred bright colored eggs "hiding" in the grass, bushes, next to rocks, on street signs, on window sills ... everywhere. You could tell there was going to be some serious celebration in a non-religious way around that house because Dennis was sitting there in a full body bunny suit laughing with the kids. I wish I had a camera.

In my own way I was hopping like a bunny this morning. I went downtown for the Sunday run and it was p-e-r-f-e-c-t: 50 degrees and partly cloudy. It was a morning that I thought may result in a light turnout because of Easter but there were no less than 16 of us to go at 0700. We had risen. We were going to run.

A recent occurrence has been out-of-town visitors going to the orlandorunnersclub.org Web site and learning of our Sunday runs. Veteran Jack (72 years old) channels them to Park Avenue to join us. Today we had a Birmingham, England constable who has run the London Marathon many times. Also today, among the locals, were two tapering for Boston next week and one opting to run the Paris Marathon next Sunday. She said she ran another race in France once, at Burgundy, where she struggled to adopt the local custom of drinking wine at the fluid stops.

The group took off filling the avenue from curb to curb. A few "car back" shouts would cause for a merge to one side that had me thinking about a bicycle race. I ran with Mary for awhile to hear how she qualified for Boston (ran Chicago to pace a friend for 13 miles; the friend dropped out and she just kept going and just qualified in 3:55).

After the water/Gatorade stop (4 miles) we all took off again and I fell in with identical twin girls, the copper from England and Sal, a deputy sheriff from around here. Twin Theresa is the one running Paris. Our group was moving pretty fast. I knew the twins to be good runners and I was having no trouble keeping up. My usual gang was somewhere behind us and only caught up when we were leaving the 7th mile fluids stop.

The last three miles, with a few hills, had me feeling so good. I was wishing to myself that these were the conditions in Atlanta two weeks ago. We finished the 10 miles and I was on a great runners' high. I had a hop in my step all the way home.

It turned out I covered the ten in 1:28 which was a 8:53/mile pace. Folks, I haven't run anything longer than five miles in an under 9 minute pace since the New Haven 20K race last Labor Day with Michelle, Jon, April Anne, Danny, Dianna and a few others. I was definitely in a groove today. What a feeling. I hope you have it today or sometime soon.