Training Log: Swampfox

Tree leaves began opening in town today. I really thought that gates off the main highway through the National Forest would be opening in time for the weekend as well, but when I went up I was disappointed to see they hadn't been unlocked yet. Since the reasons given to the public have varied over the years for why the roads get gated off for a few months in late winter and early spring, and since they didn't use to do it, I don't know what the real reason is.

But no matter. I hadn't counted on the roads being open yet, and since I wanted to go for an O' run, I decided to run at Remarkable Flats, where you can park right by the gate and be in a perfectly good place to run from.

Nobody else was out there when I started off, unless you count the wind, but I'm not counting that. Quite a nice day to be out. And very easy to notice that I feel really out of shape to be running at some higher intensity pace up and down the hills. Typical for this early in the season, and of course every year now you're another year older when another year older doesn't help! ; )

But it did feel good to be running in some relatively new Oroc 280s (fire red, for added speed) vs the old and falling apart Arctic Claw 300s. So much for shoe jargon.

I wasn't making any real effort to stay focused while I was out there, and, sure enough, a couple of times the penalty was to make some small misses near controls. Maintaining focus may well be the hardest part about O', and if you're not even making the effort to try, well...ha!

Not that it's defensible, but in my defense anyway, I was almost thinking as much about how it felt to be running and not really in good shape as I was thinking about the navigation, and how it must really suck to someone who's never in even mediocre shape.

I did some very easy running at Happy Jack, and was doubly happy to see that work has begun to clear off trails from the windstorm last week.

Ran intervals today. Since the gates into the National Forest are still closed, I had to run in from a gate to get to where I wanted to be--though in this context "had to" is funny because it worked out to be about the right amount for a warmup/cooldown anyway. Windy and sunny out, with the wind not being bad, while it did keep it cool enough that a light jacket and knit cap were nice to have on.

Knee was about what passes for usual these days: a bit of discomfort or soreness while warming up, but more or less fine otherwise. And actually in some weird way it usually works out that running faster feels better than running slowly--not that I was running all that fast.

More weirdly, the Forest Service has recently taken some kind of masticating machine down the road I was running on, and taken down (chewed up) many smaller trees and saplings right along the sides of the road. What they've taken down seems almost random, enough so that it's difficult to guess what the purpose was. The trees weren't encroaching into the road or road shoulder, the road is plenty wide and doesn't get much traffic at any one time anyway, and sight lines were perfectly fine as they were. Maybe it's just big boys with big toys?