My legs are SORE today! We ran East Boulder/Whiterock yesterday, a lovely 7.5 miler with lots of hills. Obviously I haven’t run hard on hills in a LOONNNNGGGGG time, because I’m a sore girl today.
My quads are feeling it most of all, and as an interesting factoid, my neck is a little sore, though that could be from a(nother) virus I’m fighting. You heard right, folks; I’m fighting round three right now. Seems the kids and I are playing a very polite game of sharing our germs this winter. As soon as one of us gets well, the next one comes down with it, and passes it to the third… and so on. But I don’t want to talk about that today.
The run yesterday was AWESOME! The day started out totally clear with the most brilliant blue sky I’ve seen in months. I adore Colorado because our air is thin enough up here to get a really good look at the sky and the mountains in the touchable distance. We don’t have all that extra oxygen hanging around, muddying up the view. I love Colorado and the thinness of the air. Too much oxygen and the lungs get wimpy. At a mile above sea level, things are perfect. Most healthy people’s blood oxygen level hovers around 97-98%. Who needs those extra percentage points of oxygen? Not me!
I checked the temperature before I dressed yesterday, hoping against hope that it was above freezing. If it was 35 degrees by 6 AM, then chances were good that the temp would creep higher during the run and I could actually get away with wearing shorts. It wasn’t to be… the thermometer read 29 degrees, so I resigned myself to running tights and my red pullover. As an afterthought, I grabbed the famed pink jacket, knowing that the first mile of Whiterock is in a gully that typically is 5-10 degrees cooler than the surrounding air and can be brutal if you’re not dressed properly.
S. stopped at my house at 6:50, and we headed down the road. It was great to catch up with her; now that the early morning basketball games are over, she has time to run at 7 AM again. There was a gang of women waiting in the parking lot when we pulled in; we were one of the last to arrive. I got myself situated, we stood around and chatted for a few minutes, and off we went.
The gully wasn’t as cold as I feared, and after a mile I had worked up a sweat. J. was super fast and had a good 200-400 meters on S., B. and me for the first two miles. She’s small, but she’s FAST. I caught up to her after we hit a downhill (I’m a big fan of downhill, I roll like an avalanche and pick up speed pretty quickly), though once we hit the brutally long hill to the top of the water tower S. and B. gained on us and passed us both. Apparently I was too busy playing with my camera to maintain a heavy pace, though after I looked at this shot of the mountains, I’m glad I dawdled.
Foothills of Boulder on a beautiful Spring morning
At the water tower we stopped and waited for T. to arrive. J. bemoaned the fact that she doesn’t have the strength to plow up the hills as fast as the rest of us with our huge legs, so we posed and she snapped this picture. I cropped it so as to not embarrass anyone. Note the huge leg muscles and glutes. HA!
Killer glutes! Take THAT, hills!
We did the “lollipop” loop, hooked back around to the “stem”, and headed home. By this time I was sweating buckets and had taken off my hat and gloves. The pink jacket would have been history, but the arms won’t stay tied around my waist and it’s never worth the effort to try to carry it, so I sucked it up and sweated, figuring that sweating is considered therapeutic in many circles. Some people even PAY to sweat. Since I was getting it for free, I figured I’d go hog wild.
J., S. and B. got farther and farther ahead and I fiddled with my camera. T. was a little behind me fighting the good fight with her own cold, so I hooked into her pace and conducted a spirited monologue with my captive audience. By mile 6 she was pretty much toasted, and said that she was about done. I did what all good running buddies do; I ignored her and kept talking, giving her something to focus on other than her tired legs and body. When we arrived at the parking lot at the end of our 7.5 miles she even thanked me! I know it wasn’t my inspired conversation that she was talking about, but the fact that I let her “anchor” into me and let me “pull” her, when she didn’t have anything left.
We waited a few more minutes for the gang to congregate (we’re kind of like the Army, in that no one gets left behind) before heading to coffee at the Brewing Market on 95th and Arapaho. I’m going to stop here, because the coffee experience was pretty amazing and there’s room to devote an entire post to the choices of coffees and milk products that go into them.
Until next time… cheers, and keep running!
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