Unshod Jogger: Graduation Weekend…back to Lynchvegas!

This past weekend my wife and I traveled back to Lynchburg, VA to participate in our graduation ceremony to confer our master’s degrees. My wife received her Masters in Professional Counseling and I will be getting mine in Teaching as soon as I finish my last classes this summer. The ceremony was awesome and over 10,000 students graduated. My parents and my sister flew in from MN for the occasion and as always time with them was too short but tons of fun. Aside from the obvious fun of hanging out with them, I was equally stoked to run on the trails surrounding Liberty Mountain. Upon arriving, I was disheartened to learn that the forecast for the weekend was rainy with a chance of rain. Luckily, the rain held off for the graduation as well as both of my morning trail runs. I did however manage to find myself some large mud holes in which to dirty myself. Below are some pictures taken from my phone while on the run. As you can see, my phone doesn't take the greatest of pictures but it does the trick.

I'm grouping 2 weeks of training together because I'm still playing catch-up and have been very busy. I am currently researching some races near Phoenix to run this fall. You can see the very, very tentative race schedule posted on the right. These are all up in the air as of right now because money and time off work are going to play a part in them since most are 4-5 hours away, save a few. But either way, I'm training to be ready to run an Ultra this fall. Most of my weekly mileage is done on the flat bike path near my place and I try to get my weekend runs done in the "mountains" in the city. My run mileage has been quite low due to increased bike mileage and simply lack of hours in the day. I've also sufficiently bruised the mess out of my feet.

Monday, 5/2/2011
AM-Ride to Work-11.66 miles (45:35)

PM-Ride part way home from work-7.25 miles (27:38)
-Flat Tire Run-4.13 (34:06)
Ended up blowing a tire on my way during this run so had to run whilst pushing my bike the rest of the way. Ended up making pretty good pace considering I was pushing a deflated bike. Looked pretty retarded too.

Wednesday, 5/4/2011
Arizona Canal-3.13 miles (22:52)

Thursday, 5/5/2011
Arizona Canal-4.76 miles (34:58)

Sunday, 5/8/2011
Hedgepeth Hills-5.45 miles (53:14)

Monday 5/9/2011
Bike from Work-11.88 miles (49:51)

Tuesday 5/10/2011
AM-Arizona Canal-3.01 miles (23:13)

PM-Bike from Work-11:11 miles (44:34)

Wednesday 5/11/2011
Shaw Butte Trail-5.19 miles (53:06)
Tried out the North Mountain Preserve area next to work. Good trails. Really rocky but some decent elevation change. Will try to use this trail more often. Most likely will have to be in the morning as the afternoons are getting too hot for my liking. Ran a mile barefoot on the infield of the track by work while waiting for Patsy to come pick me up.

Thursday 5/12/2011
Ride home from Work-12.85 miles (57:50)

Sunday 5/15/2011
LMTS-Lake Trail/Great Escape/Split Decision-7.5 miles (1:18:20)
Great run on the trails. Started the run very early and in the dark and the rain so it was very slow going to start with and the slow pace seemed to continue throughout the whole run. I didn't mind because it was good to be back out in the woods again.


Was nice to run under a canopy and in the mud and green!

It was also nice to get some decent hill climbing in as well. The run up the Split Decision road/trail is all uhill and by the top I was above the low cloud/fog and the sunrise was beautiful. Monday I ran basically the same route with a short detour onto the lawn mower trail, picture featured here.