Easter Run at Bradley Palmer

Snowman and I headed down to Massachusetts Saturday night so we could join his family for a homemade Easter brunch Sunday morning. I took the role of sous-chef, chopping vegetables for omelettes and Snowman acted as chef, cooking omelettes to order, while Dana made blueberry pancakes. Yum! Needless to say there was a lot of eating along with lots of chatting. Of course, we couldn't stop at brunch, and around 2pm enjoyed a wonderful chocolate banana creme pie made by Phyllis for Irene's upcoming birthday. While the pie was great, I am not so sure it was a great idea to eat a huge piece of it an hour before a long run!

After our mid-afternoon pie break, I was starting to get antsy. While I love sitting around and chatting, I really wanted to get out and move. It was a bright sunny afternoon and I didn't want to waste it. Plus, there was no snow on the ground, which made we want to run even more. I really didn't want to repeat last week's long run experience. So after a bit of convincing, I got Snowman up from the table, and we started to get ready to head to Bradley Palmer State Park for a run. We had realized a while ago that Bradley Palmer wasn't really all that far from where his parents lived, and I had printed out the trail map, thinking it would be a great place for us to go run when we were down in the area.

There were a number of coincidences about this park that came together as we drove towards the park. We passed the Ipswich River Audubon Center, where Snowman used to do nature camps as a kid, and then almost immediately passed Willowdale Drive, where my family had lived before we moved to Connecticut in the summer before fifth grade. Bradley Palmer was just down the street, and we used to take walks there as a family. Bradley was also the home course for Snowman's high school cross country team. So, all told, it was neat to go back there just based on all that alone!

There were a fair amount of cars in the lot as we pulled in. After all, it was a nice, if slightly breezy, Easter Sunday afternoon. Snowman and I headed across the lot onto the trails, hitting a sizeable stream overflow about 15 feet from the car. Guess it was going to be a wet run! I was wearing my new Inov-8s, so they were getting a good introduction to trail running! And after this run, they don't look new anymore :-)

As we wandered the trails through the park, we hit a fair amount of mud and slop along with a few good ups and downs, but managed to keep a pretty good pace through the run. The park was really nice, and the trails we hit ranged from narrow single track, to wide gravel paths, a beautiful section of trail through the pines along the Ipswich River, a few stretches on a wide old carriage road as well as a nice meander along the edge of a wide open field. We also worked Snowman's old 5k xc course into the run, which was fun. Tough course!

We finished up in 1:16:35, figuring we had gotten in our scheduled 8 miles for the day. I was a bit tired during the run, in part from all that pie and not sleeping well the night before, but overall felt pretty good and was really happy to be out on the trails. Yes, we were mud covered and our feet were soaked, but boy was it nice!