Catch Up...Again

So, I'm very impressed with the runner's who are also bloggers who regularly get their posts out even though they work.  Impressed, but not inspired...enough.  I am behind again.  I guess I should start with

Saturday:

Met up with lots of TMs at the Brad.  I'm guessing close to 20 people were running. Thanks to a little slowness on my part, we were still in the parking lot when Yana showed up!  Just last week, Rick and I had been saying that we hadn't seen her in ages.  Ian, Mindy and I were doing a loop of the BBU.  As we expected, there were all kinds of distance plans in the group.  The nice part is there are lots of jumping off spots so people could run together till they were done.

It didn't take too long before there were two distinct group.  Ian was leading the faster group.  I was in the chase group...maybe the pelleton.  Anyhow, we had a good group snaking through the single track on the east side.  I yakked with Yana for most of the east side, about 5.2 miles.  As always, it was fun catching up. She never fails to amaze me by her ability to run well and pretty long after little or no running.

Back in the parking lot, we lost a few people.  Ian's lead group was significantly smaller; ours would drop to three by Lawrence Rd.  Somehow it seemed right to be down to Mindy, Nathan (could his trail name be Double T, T^2, or Twinkle Toes?  When Nathan took the lead, I'd mentioned to Yana to watch how light on his feet he was.  I love to watch him run.  She called him Twinkle Toes.  Well, the Squirrel and I have been struggling to come up with a trail name for him...actually thinking of using NatN (needs a trail name...but really close to spelling NAThaN), so it almost seemed to work.  I suggested T^2 (reads T squared).  He liked Double T (seemed more like a brand)).

I had bouts of feeling pretty tired, but held on.  When we hit the summit, on our way to Lunch Break, we met up with Ian's group, now of three also.  They were summitting after finishing Lunch Break.  After a brief visit, they finished and we pushed on.  Nathan had shared the end of Scout and Squirrel's worst/last training run.  I still believe his joining in changed the feel of that seemingly cursed run.

Sunday:

The Squirrel left.... :(   I had work stuff to do.  I couldn't justify driving to Brad.  Hmmm....OK.  I settled on Thorncrag.  It's great running and unavoidably good hill work.  I'd say the only drawback is it doesn't have enough miles of trails, but, close by and beautiful.  I got in just over five and got back home to work.

Wednesday:

Since I had stuff to work on Monday and an actual seminar to give on Tuesday evening, I didn't get to run till Wednesday.  I decided to visit Brad on the way home from work.  <3 <3 <3  Since it was kind of rainy, there were hardly any cars in the lot.  I did recognize on vehicle right off and knew that Pathfinder must be out there somewhere.  I never ran into him.  Not a few hundred yards into the run, I caught myself smiling.  I just kept feeling it.  Oh yeah, I do like to run by myself.  I enjoy my TM family so much that I would never choose not to run with one, but...    I love to run by myself, especially when it's at Brad and not super long run.  I love to run.  I felt the stress of the last few days melt away.  Brad, what would I do without you?!

Thursday:

Pretty much a repeat of Wednesday's run except it was sunny and warm, so more people on the trails.  Still, I love Brad and I appreciated another solo run.  On Fox West, there is a squirrel that I've named Jeremy; it jumped out and scared the shit out of me.  I think I screamed as loud as when the real Jeremy scared the real Squirrel and I heading down Lunch Break.

 Back in the parking lot I met up with Aaron.  At first I thought it was someone Mindy and I had run into back in Feb/Mar.  We'd met up with a new doctor thinking about moving to the area from Arkansas.  I was about to say, "Oh, you did stay," when I noticed his plate was from N.Dakota.  So, I told him the story of the guy we met earlier so he would think I was totally a whack job.  Turns out Aaron has run a few times with the TMs on TNR.  I think he's gonna start joining us on Saturday's and (maybe) is thinking of the BBU!!!