Thursday November 15, 2007

9 miles 1:10 Gallagator-Sourdough Trail out and back size 11 250s
This is the best run I've had since I broke my foot. I took the last 3 days off because my ankle was pretty upset about not being in a boot anymore, but it seems to slowly be getting better and adapting to the running again. I did take some ibuprofen before this run, which is extremely rare for me, but I had this exact kind of pain a couple of years ago and was able to run through it in less than a month with a little ibuprofen. We'll see how everything feels once the pills wear off. But, on the run itself, the ankle felt pretty darn good. It didn't get worse throughout the run, but there was definitely some pain in there every now and then. Just gotta keep up the strengthening exercises.

The Sourdough Trail is pretty great. I can get on Gallagator within 4 minutes of my front door and then take that south up to Sourdough which goes all the way south to Goldstein Rd (where I turned around this morning). From there it's still about another 2.5-3 miles (on roads, unfortunately) to the mountains (i.e. Bozeman Creek Canyon), which is one of the few mountain trails that's relatively packed down in the wintertime here. I just hate driving to trailheads, so I'm always looking for the best ways to run to them. In Colorado Springs, if you live near CC or the downtown area you can take trails all the way to the mountains or Garden of the Gods---that's such a privelege, especially in a city of that size.

Speaking of winter, it's already here in Bozeman, which is pretty disappointing for me, but what I expected. This morning, every trail was very slick packed snow and ice; the trails don't get like that in Colorado Springs until January/February usually, and when they do it's only for a couple days, maybe a couple of weeks, at a time. It just seems like now that's it's cold here (lows in the upper teens), the trails are going to stay like this until April. I probably could've gone running shirtless in the Springs today.

I still am not quite sure what I'm going to be doing or where I'm going to be after the first of the year, but seeing the early season condition of the trails here is a pretty big motivator to be elsewhere for the winter...