Marathon Training - Day 69

Friday, May 8, 2009: It was a mostly cloudy cool start to the day today, and that carried over to the start of my run, late in the morning. I decided to do a long run today. After checking my training log, I noticed that I already had the total number of miles for the training period, but, I was about 13 miles short for my weekly total. So, I decided that would be my goal: at least 13 miles. The best course for this was to do the up and over to Ashley Lake again. During the early part of the run, the sun came out, so I slipped off the wind-breaker and zipped it into its own pouch. However, by the time I left the blacktop, just after the 3.5 mile mark, it started to rain (mixed with a few ice pellets). So, I unzipped the pouch and put the wind-breaker back on. The gravel road at this point is a couple of switch-backs along with some pretty steep uphill. I walked a bit of this and decided to fetch bottles and cans that I saw along the way. The bottle and can pickup continued up over the pass and most of the way back down the other side. The turnaround point was just along the north side of Ashley Lake.

The return run was a combination of walks and short jogs as I collected the bottles and cans into stacks of at least four or more items. By the time I crossed back over the pass to the blacktop, I counted 25 piles of bottles and cans gathered along the route (from the 3.1 mile mark to the 6.5+ mile mark, which was the turnaround point). Once I hit the blacktop, I mostly jogged until I started running out of energy with about a mile left to get back to the ranch. At that point, I did a brisk stretching walk until the last 300 yards or so. I could see the pups out in the yard and whistled and called to them. As I finished, my wife came out of the house too, and cheered me on to the end of the run like I was finishing a marathon! It was a great special treat (even though I only ran about half a marathon for the training run). Running log: 13.1 miles (combo of walk run for some sections); Can pile count: At least 25 piles of 4 or more items; a plastic bag containing 2 bottles and cans collected in the last two mile section.