Two blog entries in one day....I must be going crazy or something. A coworker of mine passed this website along to me www.mapmyrun.com . It's been a good site for my running because being a data junkie, I can go home and map my routes to see how far I've run. Today I wanted to do a little exploration so I decided to run down to Gorge Metro Park and see where it took me. I ended up running all the way down into the Valley to another Metro Park called Cascade Valley. I'd ridden my bikes by all of these places before but never ventured in. Absolutely beautiful. It's a shame that the parks are closed to bikes because I kept thinking how great it would be to take the cross bike down there and ride around. There are a lot more trails down there but I was just trying to find the quickest way out since daylight was quickly fading and I was starting to get cold. Anyway, an hour after leaving the house I returned, a little tired but happy I completed my route.
brian
Here's the route:
11.23.2007
Elving, Training and just general Loafing
With Scott Thor's departure to sunny SoCal I'm going to have to step it up a bit with my blogging entries now that it looks like I'm the premier 'local' blogger for SV by default. Note I said local as Thor will always be a Velo at heart.
I can tell you that the past month has flown by and it looks like December is all setup to do the same. I wish I could say I've been putting in mega-miles on the bike but the truth is I've barely even wanted to look at my bike, let alone ride it. The last time I was out on the road was about three weeks ago when I hooked up with teammates Tim House and Darrin Kert for a 40 miler. I'm usually in a mindset this time of year where I welcome the break from the bike but am looking forward to kicking off my training again. This year I'm in a totally new situation where I really am not in a hurry to ride again; not sure what the change has been for me but I hope I kick out of it soon as my waistline can't take much more time off.
Elves and More has been keeping me busy and like I said previously, I'll be even busier as we begin to receiving our bikes and get ready for the assembly and delivery. If you haven't already, please go to our website to see how you can become involved. There is no better way to kick off your holidays, I can guarantee you.
In my previous blogs, I talked about my experience running in the Akron Marathon. This has me motivated for 08 to run my first full marathon. I figured that I'm turning 35 next year and what better way to celebrate (besides being race eligible in the masters category now) then by running 26.2 miles for the sheer fun of it. I'm working with my cousin who has raced several of them to setup my training program for next year. This is what it looks like so far:
It's a fairly ambitions schedule for a first timer. I think I'll know fairly early in the schedule on whether its attainable or not but my goal is to run a Boston Qualifier with for me will be 3 hours and 15 minutes. Some people approach Boston as wanting to run a few warm up marathons first before trying to qualify. My thoughts are why go through all that suffering, just go for it and see what happens. Starting off the program with 6 mile runs means that my running can't begin on day one of the program. I've made an effort to keep running at least a few days a week and hope to continue to do so through the winter and spring while trying to enter some half-marathons and 10k events along the way. One of my favorite runs that I've recently found is from my house down to a park called Babb Run. From my place, through the trails and back it makes for a very nice 5 miler. Everytime I've gone down I've always wanted to keep running and exploring but couldn't because of time constraints. That's a first for me as usually I'm always very happy to be finished running. Down there I didn't want to stop. What's amazing about this place is that its so close to home and nobody knows its even there, giving you your own private park in the middle of suburbia. About five years ago there was a lot of flooding in the area which washed out the road leading down into Babb Run. Because no repairs have been made to it, the place is completely empty. Here's a picture that I was able to find looking down into Babb Run.
Well, that's it for now. I will do my best to keep updates coming a little more frequently.
brian
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)