Friday, April 30, 2010

The Trails Are Calling and I Must Go

The title is a 'lil remix of John Muir's quote, "The mountains are calling and I must go." For being a trail runner, I haven't been doing a lot of trail running lately. Yesterday I ran a neighborhood (neigh-boring-hood) 4 miles. This has been a long winter and now a very wet spring. Which has made the trails muddy and I just haven't been feeling like making my knee's ache from the wet suction effect, nor straining muscle from trying to move through slippery earth or dealing with wet, muddy shoes. If I had shoes to rotate, it might make that a little less of a sticking point, but at this time I only have one pair of shoes that aren't over mileage.
But, tonight was the Gal Gallup run at the Sandrat trails. The ground had dried out so I went early to run with Laurie and Coleen. Coleen led at a brisk 10:30ish min/mile pace. I don't know if that was the real average but every time I looked at my watch we were doing 9 something... 10 something.... I quit looking. We past 2 miles, then 3miles.... I stopped talking. I tried to stop my brain from thinking because all that I came up with was something like:
I have to stop.
I can't keep this up.
etc.
Negativity I didn't need. So, like I said, I told myself to shut off the brain. It wasn't doing me any favors.
New rule: Don't shut off the brain.
Within no time at all of mindless brain wandering I hit a sunken rock HARD. And boom, I was down, sliding into an invisible home base. I got up and thought SAFE! But, as we resumed walking I realized my left shoulder and wrist hurt. Ugh, annoying. We resumed running and my left knee sorta clicked. UGH, very annoyed at myself.
Then, not a couple minutes later, BOOM, my foot hit another rock. Luckily I did a Superman, staying airborne until my foot was back under me. But now I was pissed at myself. I was just tired and I had probably stopped picking up my feet enough. Not used to running so fast took the juice outta me quickly.
However, I'm still really happy to have run with these girls tonight. Every Thursday is a nice little challenge for me, and I need that. It's either faster than I usually run or an exercise in not being able to take walking breaks (as much as usual) as we run single file on single track trail. Both really great for a tempo training run midweek.
At mile 2ish Laurie had just finished telling us how a tree we were climbing over had fallen during her last run. Then we heard this huge creeeeeeeeeak! Mile 4 brought back the creaking and groaning of the trees waving high in the wind so we pressed on the gas to finish up. My watch said 4.5 miles but the girls say it's a 5 mile loop.
Felt good to be back on trails and back in nature!

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:45 AM

    Sorry we got you running so fast you tripped! Glad you came out though! See you next week.

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  2. Oh gosh it wasn't your fault - That's trail runn'n! Thanks for challenging me!

    ReplyDelete