Rundle (1) Norwood Young America.

What’s a Rundle?

Rundle is the name I give to my training runs. 

Do you remember way back in the far off Covid times of a couple of years ago? Wordle was the big thing, and people posted their scores all over social media. I got sick of those posts very quickly. In reply I posted my Strava run details and called them “Rundles”. The name stuck. 

Here then is the first Rundle of the blog.

You would expect that my first Rundle would be of a route that I run regularly. Not so. This is the first time I’ve run this route in Norwood Young America. 

As I’m tapering down for Grandmas marathon, I find myself tiring of my regular shorter routes in my home town, and I’m in need of a change. My gym is the Snap Fitness in NYA so I thought I’d run around there. A sort of voyage of discovery. 

After a 20 minute warm up in the gym, I set out on my three mile/5K run. (I’d measured it out on Google Earth the night before so I was pretty certain of the distance.) 

It’s nice to run on new roads, distances can fly by quicker because you don’t know where you are. On a familiar run you know exactly where you are. 

All. 

The. 

Flipping. 

Time. 

It can get quite tedious. 

I left the health club and ran past the school, through a residential area and turned at a delightful small town baseball park (note to self; take pictures next time). 

I ended up taking a wrong turn at a staggered 5 road crossroads, but that made little difference to the total distance covered. The only drawback being that I ran on the shoulder of the busy Highway 5 for about 1/4 mile. In another way it was a fruitful wrong turn, as in the distance I spied my favourite food truck. Elephant Joe’s Coffee. I decided to stop there when I was done. As I approached the end of my run, I saw that there was an underpass beneath Highway 212 leading into Norwood itself. There’s another new running route to discover sometime.

The pace of 9:04 minute miles was likely a bit fast, but I find that short runs can be quite comfortable at quicker paces by this stage of training. You’re hardly eating into your energy reserves at all, and if your breathing is fine. You’re good. 

It’s humid hereabouts right now, and thanks to the Canadian forest fires, there’s an air quality alert for sensitive groups today as well. But I felt quite comfortable out there, and had such a pleasant time discovering 5 kilometers of new roads, that a cup of coffee from Elephant Joe’s was a nice treat to end the run with.

I’ll have a large “Ivory Elephant” please. Thank You.