We now interrupt your flow of angsty missed-race agonizing to talk about an entertaining thing I did last Saturday morning: two runs on opposite sides of the valley.
Why? Because I felt like it, and I could!
Run the First: San Tan Mountain Regional Park
Cadence Running Company hosts a group trail run on Saturday mornings, and I’m there most weeks. I’ve talked about it before. Been going out there for almost two years.
Even though this was the first run of the day, it was my bonus run. Since the plan to run out at McDowell with Kris had been in place for a couple of weeks (I’ll talk about that below), I was originally going to skip the Cadence run and just do McDowell.
Fortunately, there was a (small) perfect storm of circumstances that let me do both. First, the weather was better than we had any right to expect at this time of year. It rained in the early morning hours and brought the temperature down to a nice range. Second, the wife isn’t an early riser by nature (neither am I, for what that’s worth), so with the weather looking to be cooler, she wanted to sleep in a little longer and leave later than we would normally do with near-summer temperatures. That gave me a window I was able to fit the early Cadence run into.
Third: donuts. Trevor, who usually leads the run, decided to bring donuts for everyone. Donuts are one of my favorite things in life. I was bummed when I was going to miss out and thrilled when I was able to fit everything together and make it work. I even got to make a donut request!
So I did the run with the group, snarfed a donut, and then headed off to pick up Kris for…
Run the Second: McDowell Mountain Park
Kris is getting into trail running with the intent to do Ragnar Trail with our big group this year. Awesome!
It so happens that one of Aravaipa Running’s Insomniac series of summer night races, Adrenaline, has a 10K distance that covers a lot of the same ground that we’ll be running at Ragnar. I thought that doing the 10K might be a good way for her to preview what running it during Ragnar would be like. The plan was to do a pre-run in the daytime and do the race at night. That was she’d get to see it both during the day and at night and be more familiar with it either way, since it’s too early to know what time she’ll be actually be doing it.
Last Saturday was the daytime pre-run. This upcoming Saturday is the race.
So after I left San Tan, I ran home, picked her up, and we were off to McDowell. San Tan is down on the south side of the valley, and McDowell is up on the north end. The weather was still nice and never really got too hot, although it was warm and plenty sunny. It was breezy and that kept things pretty comfortable for the duration.
It was a good run and I think it accomplished exactly what it was meant to. Kris had been a little nervous about the trail and the race and doing it all in the dark, and getting a feel for it in the daytime when she could see it all helped settle her nerves. She might even be looking forward to it a little bit now.
We’ll see what happens!