Sunday, February 12, 2006

Oh No! Not Five Mile Drive

While Rob and Eric were out on their urban adventure, I drove to the park (honking at Rob and Eric as I drove by) to meet the rest of the group. I ran with Jessie - she's new to the area and fairly new to the group. Jessie is a kick! She's full of stories and is always laughing.

The one-way road that runs through the park is pretty hilly. There is a major hill at the beginning, then probably 3.5 miles of rolling hills. Jessie was telling me how she ran there a few weeks ago and didn't feel ready for it. By this time, we're half way up the big hill - she looks over at me and asks when we are going to get on the trails? I told her that we weren't running the trails, we were running Five Mile Drive. Her response? "Nooooooo, this is supposed to be fun! I can't do this!" I said it would be fun and she replied that Five Mile Drive was NOT fun! I had to admit to her that I can't seem to find my way on the trails alone - I depend on someone else to lead me. Even though all trails come out to the road eventually, the road is heavily wooded and it's hard to tell where you are. It's especially hard for someone as directionally-challenged as I am. If I'm the one in charge of finding the way, we run the loop. So we stuck to the road and I'm happy to report Jessie made it and she even admitted she had fun. In fact, we took about a five minute walk break halfway through, and still came in at 58 minutes. I was really happy with that time. I spent the first half of the run feeling sick, but after the walk break finally felt good. I'll be sure be happy when they figure out what is making me feel so sick.

We spent some of our Starbucks time figuring out where we want to run for the next two Sundays, and discussing the third race in the Resolution Series (coming up the weekend after next). The third race is either a 15K or 15 mile. Quite a few runners from the Run Club will by running it, so Jessie and I made plans to meet there, run for an hour through Ft. Steilacoom Park, then get back to the high school in time to catch our runners coming in.

Hope the rest of your Sunday is great!

2 comments:

Olga said...

You "directionally challenged" self didn't have any problems navigating us during night of Rob's crewing! Glad your run went great.

*jeanne* said...

Directionally-Challenged is my middle name!!! Why couldn't my Mom have picked something more like, oh, I don't know, "Louise", maybe? Oh yeah, that's right. She DID. I got dubbed "Directionally-Challenged" LATER in life!
;-)