In the evening, we were treated once again to a visit by one of the two fox that appear to be living nearby. Hope they have kits and bring them out to visit sometime soon. These guys are quite skittish but appear very healthy and are so pretty - I love their black tail stripes!
Tuesday morning, it was already 68 degrees when I headed out at 5:30 am. It was a sweaty, warm, muggy, buggy, cobwebby run out in the Cathance. But, as always, the river was gorgeous. The air smelled sweet, the swamp iris and sheep laurel are blooming, and the blackberry brambles are flowering. A good 7 miles before 7:00 am!
Wednesday morning was another early run, except the temps were about 10+ degrees cooler as I headed out to run 6 miles on the cart paths. Felt lovely. I also felt tired, so I took it easy.
Wednesday evening, I took Sam to swim club. At 5:15, swim club ended and all the other swimmers, and the coach, took off. But Sam, she put back on her goggles, jumped into the pool and swam another out and back in her lane. Love this kid 💕
Thursday I was kicking myself for not getting out to run. It was such a nice day! But the extra sleep time in the morning was nice. Getting up at 4:30 three days in a row is rough.
This morning, I was up early again. I had planned to head up to Camden for a run in the park, but after a beautiful week, cooler, damper weather rolled in and I reluctantly decided it wasn't worth driving up there to run in the rain :( But since I had already made plans to be out of the house early, I decided to stick to that and hoped to get in my long run in at the Brad before the majority of the rain started to fall. The plus of this plan was that a group was getting together at 7:00 to run and celebrate John and another runner's birthday, so I would get a bit of company mid-long run. Perfect.
I parked at John's house at 6:10 am and headed out on the trails. I forgot to bring bugspray (!!) but the mosquitos weren't bad as long as I kept moving! I ran the start of the east side BBU course, but realized as I hit the junction with Ginn at the top of the snowmobile trail that I wouldn't make it back to the lot for 7:00 so I turned around and ran back down the snowmobile trail. I was the last to arrive but since there was discussion as to the route the group was going to take it wasn't a problem - phew! I didn't recognize most of the people there, only Maureen and Tami, but the others were very nice. I think John had originally wanted to run the Scuffle but not everyone had that kind of time, so we headed up Northern Loop to the summit.
The four miles with the group was a bit choppy with a lot of stopped time, but since I was planning to be out there for a while anyway it wasn't a big deal. We ran down Switchback and then did a loop over on Knight's Woods before returning to the lot to pick up a watermelon and donuts to bring up to the summit via the Summit Trail. I believe there was also a bottle of brandy (??) but I did not partake in that! It was windy and rainy atop the summit but we stood around eating donuts anyway :) until it really was quite cold and my hands were starting to feel numb! Tami, John and I ran down the Terrace while the others took the shorter route down. It was fun to catch up with Tami a bit, but she had to head off to work like the rest of the crew so it was down to just John and I.
He had to head into work too but didn't want to go yet, so he joined me on the Scuffle, which was fun and I was glad to have his company out there! That left me only the final 5 miles to complete, so I decided to run back across to the mountain side. I ran back up to the summit, down Tote, out onto Boundary and the back to Tote via Reverse Mindy, cut up to the Boundary again off of Tote and ran up to the summit and down. I ended up having to only add on about 0.1 miles to get to a nice round 20, which I thought was pretty good :)
So all in all, a nice, soggy, muggy, heavy, humid but cool, showery, buggy morning for a run at Brad, complete with company for the middle 10 miles. Although I had really been looking forward to some fun, sunny miles up in Camden, hopefully I'll get up there soon, and in the end, the morning worked out quite nicely! Happy to have gotten the miles in without getting soaked by rain, although it didn't matter much since I ended up totally soaked with sweat! HA! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment