Getting excited here about some upcoming runs!
One is this coming weekend. We have an Easter weekend to visit family, so will be traveling to near where the setting of my climate change novel Back to the Garden took place, in the Selkirk Mountains, which dip from British Columbia into Idaho (where the story began). I love the area: it’s mountainous and wild. Every time we visit, the trip there is full of the greatest mountain views, horse ranches, eagles’ nests, and other scenes that are very much in “the spirit of the West”. The run I’m doing there is just my normal weekend run, and I’m wondering if I’ll find any flat trails. I usually have anywhere from 300-600 feet elevation per week in my runs, so I don’t mind some hilly areas, but am trying to increase my pace and distance as well.
The big run after that is the Vancouver Sun Run, which is 10K, which is just over 6.2 miles, for those people out there, like me, who didn’t learn the metric system. I’m used to it now that I live in Canada though! This run is on April 19. I’ve run-walked the Sun Run before, and haven’t completed my training to run 10K, but I’m going to attempt to run most of it. I’m not a very competitive person; the person I compete most with is myself, so I’m going to at least try to run to the big hill, run-walk up it, and see if I can finish out the run after the hill. Most runners have to take a small break here and there (stopping for crosswalks, stopping to go to the bathroom, stopping to do a number of little things), and I am pretty confident that with these small normal breaks I can do nearly the whole run as long as there are no injuries or other problems on that day. I feel confident about this because while the first 10 minutes are always my hardest, I really get into the groove after that and feel like I could keep running. I’m usually reigned in by time limits during the week.
The run after that happens in June; it’s a 5K-10K Father’s Day run-walk. My husband and I will be running, and I think his dad and aunt are also coming–but we’ll each go our own paces. I can’t remember if I signed up for the 5 or 10K, but again, not feeling competitive, I’ll just do my best that day.