Running Song of the Day:

Another two coffee day. I drink from a big mug—20 ounces. So I had 40 ounces of coffee this morning. I actually just had a dirty chai latte with lunch too, so I’ve had like 5 “regular” servings of coffee today. This is becoming an escalating problem for me.

But yeah, had two coffees this morning. Me and K watched the Jasmin Paris documentary about her (historic!) run at last year’s Barkley Marathons.

The doc was well done. It captured the moment pretty well. I still remember following this on twitter last year, chatting with peeps in a discord ultrarunning server and all of us going absolutely insane when Keith posted that Jasmin had completed loop 5.

So yeah, watched the doc and then felt really inspired to get out there and absolutely medicorely plod through my 10k for the day.

Today I decided to try to, completely on the fly, map out a new run for myself that’s a 10k loop. My usual small run day consists of a 4 mile loop with very little back-tracking or running on the same roads twice. I don’t have that for a 10k, but I’d like to find one so I can reliably fall back to something like “okay I just have to do the easy 10k loop” when this whole thing starts to get a lot harder to keep up.

I ran my usual easy route for about 1.6 miles and then took a different turn down into the industrial zone in town. Lots of quasi-liminal spaces like this:

Good news: my mental map was spot on; I was able to re-route myself exactly where I wanted to end up.

Bad news: I only added about half a mile to my regular route.

I had to take another detour to do a loop around a certain few roads in town that I know is 1 mile long, and then was able to connect that with a route back home that would get me to 6.2 miles.

I actually ended up clocking the run exactly at 6.22 miles on my watch, which is 10k more or less bang on. I don’t like to run it that close to the wire for any mileage goal, but maybe the accidental perfect run is what was meant to happen today.

A cool thing while touring the dilapidated hell&industrial parts of town today was that I got to pass over the freight-only rail road tracks that cut through the entire borough. I looked down and saw an overpass down the track, and then I had the distant memory that there was some kind of greenway a town over where the tracks end.

I quickly pulled up maps and tried to confirm that this was the correct section of railroad and…I think it is? This is definitely a future-run concept; head back to these tracks and see where they lead. I could map it all out from home using street view and a trail running map system I have but where’s the fun in that?

(Inside you are two wolves; the first one thoroughly researches every run they do, finding the perfectly optimal route to visit the POI’s desired while also being safely covered by sidewalks the entire time and also hitting an exact mileage distance perfectly. The other wolf just goes outside and runs. Both wolves like to eat junk food after running.)

Plant of the Day:

Running Stats:

6.22 miles
in
1:05:02
so it was
5.7mph on avg
with
568 feet of climb
and I’ve run
22.5 miles this Spring

1  This might not be true.

2  This also might not be true.