Oregon Rain

Today perhaps marked the first day of official Oregon winter training. It was cold (around 47ish), windy, and rainy. But being that this is Pacific Northwest (PNW), it really wasn't that bad. The conditions were no worse than any I've run in Baton Rouge. Just that in the BR they don't crop up until January-ish and won't stick around until March (or later in some cases). But if you try hard and are flexible you can nearly always find time to run when the weather isn't all that bad. The problem I have is that it's hard to be flexible when you're stuck in a windowless room learning things that are important to your future career. In search of company, I waited until 1:30 to run with Nurse (the same one from yesterday), because running with people is always more fun. We ran from school, two Glendoveer loops, and I added on around John Luby Park. Last time I did some strides down this great wood chip path, that's not quite 100yds, but it's great for prepping for cross country. Today, then end of the path was blocked by some City of Portland (the City That Works!) employees. They didn't seem to be working all that hard. I found a new little path that once housed some BMX jumps to stride down and felt like it was adequate preparation for cross country. Though given the weather it was probably a good day to pull off some barefoot strides down a fairway considering there weren't any golfers out there.

Seeing the BMX jumps (or what remained) made me wax nostalgic over the BMX jumps I helped build when I was just a wee tot and BMX riding was getting kind of big. A group of us neighborhood boys all got together and built some pretty good size jumps on some land behind my neighborhood. I think the land was privately owned (Rumors swirled that it was where Billy Cannon buried his counterfeit money), but the owners never seemed to mind or never made it back that far to see what was going on. Considering it was a bunch of pre-teen and teenage boys and we were performing manual labor, they probably had no idea what was going on. Trying some of the jumps made me realize that while I'll try just about anything once, I wasn't cut out for BMX. Thank goodness or I might have actually hurt myself and not been able to run.

Day/Week: 7/7