Saturday, September 19, 2015

Weekend Miles

The last "big" weekend... well, it didn't quite go as planned but I still got in some decent miles.

The plan was for 24 at Bradbury. Started at 6:30 am, my car the only one in the lot. A reminder from Ryan about the 12 hours of Bradbury starting on Saturday helped me decide to do my lap on the east side first. I ran the Scuffle, and only ran into one biker. Perfect. Of course, I came around the bend to hear him let out a huge belch. Ha :) My legs, on the other hand, were not feeling so perfect. They felt much like concrete in fact. Pace wasn't terrible, but the legs, they had no life.

I stopped back at the lot, hit the bathroom, and then texted Ryan to let him know that "long" might be relative today. I was going to continue on but wasn't sure how long I would last. I was just feeling out of sorts, with my stomach joining in on the rebellion. Oh yah. I ran the west side of the BBU loop but when I got back to the summit after the Tote, I turned to run down the Terrace instead of heading out to run Lunchbreak. This brought me to a nice even 15 soggy, sloggy miles. My legs never gained any umph and I just didn't have it in me to keep pushing. I suppose I could have/should have, but eh, I was OK with stopping. I went home, showered and slathered Biofreeze on my sore, tired legs before heading down to Portland to the Mall to take in our sick computer. Thoughts of the Mall and sick computer both make my head hurt but luckily the kind Genius at the Genius Bar thought it was just some sort of corruption and not an issue with the hard drive, etc. He was able to wipe the computer clean and not have to replace any hardware. This was all done at no charge and I was out of there in around an hour. Phew! Not as terrible as anticipated. Plus, I did stop at ColdStone to get a Mud Pie Mojo to ease my pain so that helped ;)

I actually slept well last night, perhaps a sign that things were in fact a bit more off yesterday than just a bit of unhappy legs. Oh, and Ryan says his co-worker told him that Mercury was in retrograde so that was why everyone was feeling out of sync this week. Sure, any excuse will do ;)

Up early again this morning, this time so I could get donuts at Frosty's before meeting Amy at 6:30 am for a morning run at Pineland. Yum, pumpkin donuts. Yah fall! We headed down toward the yurt, the sky still filled with the pastel colors of dawn, a low fog settled above the wet fields. So pretty.




We meandered around the lower trails before heading back up towards Oak Hill. We didn't get far before I asked Amy if we could do the inner loop so we could head over to the market so I could use the bathroom. Things were starting to heat up a bit and so we made our way back over to Oak Hill to enjoy the shaded trails. The trails had been marked with a lot of flagging and as we wound around toward the top of the field, we noticed a lot of buses unloading long legged runners. Ah, a cross country meet. Time to get out of there!

Amy decided to finish up once we got to the cars, leaving me with 4 miles to round things out to 20. I ran the campus loop, which only got me about 2.5 miles - darn - meaning the final 1.5 miles were a rather random wander around the campus without going too far down the hill - that uphill stretch is definitely not my favorite! My legs felt tired but oh so much better than yesterday! Having company definitely helped - it's always nice to talk away the miles, but I didn't feel the urge to stop at 16; I really wanted to get in those miles, if for nothing else other than the mental aspect.

We were meeting up with Ryan and Mindy for a short TARC meeting, so while we waited we walked over and sat for a while in the shade in the Pineland Gardens. It was really beautiful over there! A nice place to while away a half hour.


All in all, a decent 2 days of running, even if it all didn't quite go as planned. But then again, does it ever?!

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