rain

Saturday mornings plan was to get in easy 11 miles on 2 Ken's loops but when I got up I decided I wanted to get in something different so I went over to River Place and did the 5 mile Stairway to Hell trail.  It was really cool.  A lot of the trail meandered along a pretty creek with an awesome canopy of trees overhead and then stairs made of 8-9" thick timbers.  Seemingly unending stairs!  When I got to the end there were signs posted that a person of "average fitness" should take 90 minutes for the one way 2.5 miles.  My watch read 48 minutes so the challenge was on to see if I could turn around and get back in under 90 minutes!!  I didn't want to really push extra hard due to my planned 5k for Sunday morning but I was able to finish in 90 minutes without overdoing it terribly.

Sunday morning I woke up to rain but headed to Willco Park in Leander anyway hoping we'd get a clear window but it was not to be.  As I turned onto the county road that lead to the park off 1431 a lightning bolt came crashing down.  That was all I needed to see as I turned my car around and headed back home.  Neither me or Misty had a good nights sleep so after some breakfast we both laid down for a nap and when I got up it seemed like the weather had mostly cleared so I drove downtown for a run.  My plan was to stick to the 2 mile Pfluger/ Congress loop.  If it started raining I wouldn't be stuck a long way from my car. It's always a weird thing to start a run any other time besides first thing in the morning and sure enough it took a while to get in a groove.  Toward the end of the 1st loop I was still feeling sluggish and considered bailing out but continued on a for a 2nd loop.  Towards the end of the 2nd loop I felt the same way but decided to reverse course and get in my minimum goal of 6 miles.  When I was about done with that loop I started feeling better and made the bold decision to continue down to the Mopac footbridge and that would give me 10 miles.  I'm very happy it worked out like this.  Very seldom do I ever add onto the mileage I planned to run.  I finished in exactly 2hrs.  Not too shabby for the crazy post rain humidity and I got in a 32 mile running week to boot!!