10 on the 4th

I know it's supposed to be 4 on the 4th, but why not do more?

After a restless night, with Snowman arriving home around midnight and Ronnie the cat waking me up at 3:30, 5:30, 6:00, 6:30 and 7:30, we had a leisurely breakfast at Broadway Deli this morning. Strawberry and blueberry pancakes with one egg scrambled on the side ("I don't want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein") for me. Yum. Then we headed to Bradbury for a nice 10 mile run. The parking lot wasn't full, but there were a fair number of people out enjoying the nice day. The humidity seemed to have died down during the night (finally!), and it was quite pleasant out. Perfect for a run. We headed up the Northern Loop Trail to do one lap of the Bradbury Breaker course. As Snowman noted while we were running along, there are a fair number of ups and downs on this course and the second lap is likely going to be fairly brutal. Still, it was good to get one more round in on the course to get a feel for it. There were lots of walkers out on the trails, and we got a few good looks as we ran by. Yup, we were those "crazy runner types" :-)

After a quick stop to use the bathrooms and grab our extra fuel bottles when we finally looped back to the parking lot at 49 minutes, we headed across the street to do a lap on the Scuffle course. These trails tend to be lesser used, except by the mountain bikers who love the constant twists and turns of the single track. Over there, you get the feeling you're way out in the middle of nowhere as you weave through the woods. We ran into a foursome of bikers along the trail in the middle of the run but that was about it. I felt pretty good for most of the run, but was happy to reach the Snowmobile Trail and know we had only a mile or so back to the parking lot. To keep the run at 10 miles, we cut off the end of the Scuffle course and headed back in on the Link Trail.

This is a nice wide trail, and we were surprised to see the same foursome of bikers near the end of the trail along with one of the ranger's souped-up ATV/golf cart. One of the guys, who looked like a pretty competent biker, had tried to navigate over a rock on this flat stretch and went over the handlebars. His arm was in a make-shift splint. Poor guy. We helped one of the women walk his bike back to the parking lot, and she mentioned that he was probably trying not to do a shoulder roll as he had broken his collar bone in a road bike accident a few years ago. Man, I think I'll stick with running! I'd like to keep up my streak of no broken bones!

Total run time: 1:48:38. And now it's time to relax. Happy 4th of July everyone!