A Pair of Sevens...

Maybe a poor hand in poker, but made for a great weekend of running. Saturday I had planned to run for quite a while at Thorncrag while Sam took the SATs. Since Sam ended up coming down with something and opted not to sit for the test, I decided to just run around the house. Wow! The fields were wet, wet, wet. I'd step in grass and find myself up to my ankles in water. So when I got to the little stream, I didn't give a second thought to crossing. Wow! It was SO much colder. For a bit, I had that painful cold feeling in my toes. I ran just short of a mile before I came back to the stream. Well, I had to get back....

Another mile in, I was getting hot (my back was now to the wind). I realized my toes didn't hurt any more. My feet felt fine the rest of the run even though I did another stream crossing. I think it was that the first was too soon into the run. I was really impressed with myself till I saw the streams that the other TMs crossed that day. I finished up with just over 7 miles.

Today, Rick and I headed to Bradbury for a repeat of last Sunday's run. Though the temperature was a good deal warmer than last week, today definitely felt more raw.

When we got out of the car, we noticed Snowman in the parking lot, too. He was going to run the mountain side to get the mileage for two of the planned snowshoe races. He figured it'd be about seven miles. Well, even though that's what we planned on doing, we stuck with running on the East side.

We got a lot muddier than last week because the puddles weren't frozen and they were deeper. About half way through out run, a happy dog came bounding towards us from a different trail. I recognized the pup as Four's cousin's dog, Effie (sp?). I gave him a pat and yelled out, "Hi Four's cousin!" as I saw runners on the other trail. Four was among the group and shouted a greeting back to us.

Rick and I both thought we'd run faster this week; turns out we did, but only by a minute over our seven miles. Still felt, good and I think, if I looked at our pace, we did negative splits.

When we crossed the street to the parking lot, we saw Ryan. He was happy with his courses. Each was a little long, giving him a total of 7.7 ish. He looked just as muddy as we were and even wetter. We visited for a bit before I was too chilly to keep talking.



The muddy shoes/legs were from Saturday's run. The picture of Ally is just cause she's so damn cute!