Woke up this morning when the alarm went off at 4am. I grumbled. I was exhausted. I was set to reset the alarm when I remembered that this morning I was actually meeting someone at 5 to run, so up I got. Headed to Memorial and was cursing the clouds since it was a full moon last night. It would have been awesome to run in that moonlight. Oh well.
Met up with my running partner and off we went. We chatted and I didn’t have much problem at all today keeping with her. I’m not sure if she slowed down a bit because she was running with me, or was just taking it easy, but yeah today was much easier than when we ran the first time week ago this last Monday. It did take us longer, and I noticed when I uploaded the data off my watch that we were running 9:30s instead of the 8:30s last time. Will have to ask about that when we meet up on Monday again. “Make me work! I need the push!” But was also glad it was easy since my plan was to run trails tonight as well.
That’s right. You heard me. Or saw me as this case is. Two runs in one day! I did it because I forgot I was going to run with my morning running partner until after I had already posted saying I was going to run trails. So in case anyone showed up (and no one did) I would be at the trails to run with them.
It was colder tonight running than it was this morning too. There was quite a wind blowing which I have problems with. I can handle cold, cold and wet. But not wind. That just cuts right through me, so I bundled up in my big fleecy orange shirt and a wind breaker. And off I went. The trails were closed so I hopped the fence (relax!) and ran down Purple until it came to the trail that has logs across it to keep the bikers off, and heads towards the railroad tracks. I ran along the tracks to the street and then down to the Triangle since it doesn’t close. I figured a nice quick lap of that and back would get me about three miles. Of course it had been a loooong time since I’ve been to the triangle. And it’s always been on bike before. I found a trail that I wasn’t familiar with at all and it took me to the horse stables of the polo field. Oops. No idea where I was on the trails at this point and was also pretty close to the 3 mile mark at this time, along with thoughts of “this is going to turn into a 6 mile run!”
I back tracked my steps to where the road and trail met and found another trail, and it was short and sweet and dumped me at the rail road tracks. Cool! And I followed that and it went straight to Memorial Drive and was a lot closer than I was expecting! So my 3 mile run, which I was starting to think was going to turn into a 6 mile at least turned into only at 3.7 mile run. Which I did in about 42 minutes. Not too shabby considering I did a little walking wondering where I was going, and hopping over logs and through tunnels and such. And it was … enjoyable. I definitely will have to be doing a lot more trail running if I want to keep with my running goals.
Speaking of. I may not make my 5 days this week, so I’m cheating a little bit and using one of my two runs today as a second run. It’s going to depend on what happens with my truck on Saturday as I need to take it into the shop for it’s 115k checkup. Hopefully won’t take too long and I can get a quick run in, but if not, then yeah, I’m fudging my numbers a bit, and am OK with that.