Besides, days like these illustrate perfectly why I live here. The closer you get to the mountains, the more of the wind gets blocked, the more the sun can warm you and your surroundings. Without an alarm I woke up at 7:15 a.m. and headed south shortly thereafter. On Friday, I spent a little time at work researching the thriving (based on the number of people I saw today) Fort C running scene, and found the Spring Creek Trail. It runs south of downtown along a dribbling little creek that feeds the Poudre River, starting at Cottonwood Glen Park at the end of Overland Trail. I drove down and found the place perfectly. A couple of ladies directed me to the start of the trail and away I went.
First of all, let me explain why I pushed the first long run of this training cycle to Saturday, and the three-mile pace run to Sunday. I think most training plans are fluid, and some "real-world" adjustments are entirely appropriate. When I saw that it was going to be nice on Saturday, not so much on Sunday, I figured I'd move things around — especially when I saw Fort Collins was supposed to be 50 and sunny with light winds.
I'll spare you the gory details of the run. Because I tried to run on the grass, gravel and dirt instead of the concrete, my wobbly strides pushed my right foot into my left calf a few times, rubbing some hair off that part of my leg. I saw every kind of neighborhood, from sprawling one-story ranches to massive cookie-cutter tracts on cul-de-sacs to trailers to duplexes to dilapidated off-campus ghetto near Colorado State. As I said before, the trail wasn't packed but when I approached any Fort Collins' parks I definitely wasn't alone. Better still, about 90 percent of the people out there offered some sort of greeting — a wave, a nod, a "good morning." That never happened on the Duck Creek Trail in Davenport.
What's more is my heart rate stayed somewhat reasonable. Where my heart raced in the past month in Laramie, averaging nearly in the mid-90-percent range of my max, today's 2-hour, 3-minute jaunt kept me at 90 percent (avg 167, max 177), and I didn't go over 170 until the second half of the run. Bear in mind Fort C is more than 2,000 feet lower than Laramie and I could feel my body drinking up the extra oxygen (such as it was) like a desert-stranded vagabond. Perhaps with all this extra oxygen my body just worked more efficiently today, giving me a new batch of hope for the rest of the spring.
And I wore shorts. When I left Laramie I guessed the temperature to be in the low 20s. When I arrived in Fort C the first couple of runners I saw were in shorts and long sleeves. I figured I'd warm up plenty so I left the wind pants in the car. Couldn't have been a better move. My legs are stark white but their muscular. And they gained a little color today — which I will promptly lose over the next couple of months, until I can expose them to the world again.
As of this writing I don't know how far I went. I followed a proscribed 12-mile route I stole from MapMyRun and went a little farther. Out for an hour, back for an hour. Killed the outside muscles of my thighs in the process. Tomorrow I'll do the 3-mile pace run; wouldn't it be wise to know how it feels to run race pace with tired legs? Thought so. Back to the dreadmill I go.
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