And I could not be happier.
The 60 degree, sunny weather on Wednesday led me to take my friend Matt up on a last-minute request for a running partner in the afternoon. We headed over Viewpoint trail on the flanks of Flagstaff, through Chautauqua, and then split off for separate afternoons. That was my second time up Viewpoint that day, and all told made for 11+ miles of running on a day when I had planned for 5. Such is life in Boulder sometimes.
In the middle of that run, on our way up Viewpoint, we started discussing my sister's research on the relative stability of a running stride versus a walking stride. Not surprisingly, we both thought we felt more steady running on trails than we did walking, when we tend to hit our toes on the ever-present rocks on Boulder-area trails.
Not five minutes after discussing this, I had a classic trail runner moment: we were cruising along a smooth stretch of trail, one I take several times a week and so feel as though I know fairly well, and suddenly my toe catches on a miniscule irregularity on the trail and I'm flat on my chest in the middle of the trail.
After walking for a minute just to get re-centered, we quickly started talking about our various trail running scars. I normally get them shortly after I pass somebody, when I almost invariably trip over some very obvious feature in the trail just when I feel the best. Some of them have been worse than others.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've seen that hat since this run.
Fortunately, this encounter with the trail surface did not leave those sorts of marks.
As I alluded to above, I ran up Green with a couple friends this morning. I use the word "run" very loosely here. It took us over an hour to cover the first 4 miles, and an additional half an hour to hit the mile and a half after that. This was due in part to the steep(ish) nature of the trail up Green, but mostly because we were, at times, running in unconsolidated snow that came up to my thighs.
A view of Green Mountain from Sanitas, on Saturday.
Needless to say, the way down the mountain was much more fun. Whereas we had hit the first 5.5 miles in a little under an hour and forty minutes, we hit went downhill in under half an hour.
Chris on the final stretches of Green, Matt is just in front of him.
All in all, it was both a very difficult and a very fun run to cap off an excellent running week. I feel like I've been getting in better and better shape each and every week, and at the moment I'm not even training for anything specific. If I can keep this up (knock on wood) I might just be able to post some good results in 2012.
With that in mind, I need to start thinking of what races I want to do next week, and how I want to train for them, but that's a subject for another post.
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