Mary and John's Long Run Adventure

On Saturday John and I went for a long run. I think I've mentioned that he is running a marathon in Denver about a month after Boston....so we had a great plan. We parked the car a few miles from our house, a little outside of town where you can get to all these lovely farm roads, some dirt and some paved, very scenic, very hilly. John wanted to run 15 miles, so we mapped it all out so that he would do a loop ending at the car and run 15, and I would run back home, doing 20. Well, the problem was, we planned this all via the trusty internet and never actually drove our route to make sure it actually made sense....and, well, I will tell the rest of my story via a color coded map:

Here's the key:

Start at the yellow star and follow the route counterclockwise (i.e. go south first)

Purple line = Our planned route (about 16 miles, after which I was to run home)

Red dotted line = Route we actually ran. We missed our turn, whatever, we'll just take the next left, it will still go the same place, right? Hmm, this is getting long, Sorry John, you might end up running a little more than 15, but no problem, we can't be that far away.

Red frowny face = Point at which we saw our other route come in....and noted that we had been running for 2 hours and 55 minutes and we still had about 8 miles to go!

Blue line = Portion of route that we walked, after having run for about 3:25

Green line = Portion of the route that we hitchhiked, in a soccer mom's minivan, at my insistence....I was hungry and was NOT walking the five miles back to our car! And boy, was it a great decision.

And the final red-dotted portion: The soccer mom dropped us off to head up to town, I ran the last mile or so to the car (painfully) and John walked and I picked him up. I think I totaled about 21.5 miles, which really isn't anything crazy, but it felt long with all the adventure. Then we went home and watched our Netflicks DVD of Freaks and Geeks which I thought would be stupid and then found myself vegging out on the couch in front of it for three hours...it's so funny!

What a great way to spend a Saturday. I can't believe it's Friday again....and one month till the Marathon. I'm doing 12 miles this weekend, then one more 20+ next weekend, then it's taper time. Hope training and work and life are going well for everyone. Post away!