Wednesday, July 11, 2007

A CHANGE IN PLANS...
11 Mile Run Along the Mohawk-Hudson Bike Path
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Originally I had planned to drive over to October Mountain State Forest in Massachusetts for my run today... unfortunately, my stomach wasn't feeling so great for much of the morning and afternoon, so I postponed that trip. As it turns out, it may have been for the best - some fairly strong thunderstorms were supposed to move through that part of the Berkshires right around when I would have been in the middle of my run...

Waffled quite a bit about where to run around here and finally settled on the bike path west of Schenectady. Naturally, right around when I was getting ready to leave it started raining, and while I was driving over there it rained fairly hard... so I envisioned a cold, wet run that I would possibly end up shortening. But when I parked the car at Lock 8 and got set to run, the rain had died down to a refreshing light shower, and after 20 minutes or so stopped altogether, except for a brief shower toward the end of my time out there.

Ran the first 9.5 miles fairly comfortably at an 11 min pace, and was pleased to see that I haven't totally lost it over the last few weeks of mainly sitting on my backside. Of course, after that it took me 20 minutes to run the last 1.5 miles, and that meager mile and a half definitely hurt... so there's no question I have to get off my butt and start running again on a regular, 3 times a week, schedule. I'm beginning to suspect that both the Savoy 20 miler in late August and the Adirondack Marathon mid-September are going to be painful...

Thanks to the dreary weather I had the path mostly to myself... just me, the bunnies, and lots of birds, including a few I didn't recognize (and haven't been able to identify since returning home.)Best of all, at the end, I got to see a very colorful sunset! I'll try to remember the colors in the sky when I wake up tomorrow morning with aching legs...

JMH
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