The Rundle mistake

On reflection, I really shouldn’t have done that. After the flat out exertion of the parkrun yesterday, a race pace 9.5 miles in 70 degree heat was a mistake.

It was a decision that was on my mind through breakfast as I got ready. Should I stick to the tree lined streets around town that afford a great deal of shelter for almost every step of my run. Or do I go out onto the Dakota Rail Trail, which though not tree covered all the way, has a great deal of shelter between Lester Prairie and New Germany. 

I opted for the trail, as the roads get pretty busy in town on a Sunday morn, with folks rushing to church, and our small town is short of sidewalks in places. It can get quite unnerving sharing the road with people intent on getting to Sunday worship. As I stepped into the street and started running in the shade, I thought to myself that this was the right decision. 

Now, I’ve not run at Sub 4 hour marathon pace for many years, I wasn’t sure what pace I should be running at (it turns out that 9:09 miles is correct) I aimed for 9 minute miles. I found it quite difficult to get there and was consistently running faster than that for the first 5 miles. When I got to the turnaround point in New Germany I was really feeling it. I was dripping with sweat and in a hydration deficit. I took a few moments to recover before heading back home. 

Some very welcome shade.

It’s mostly a very easy downhill on the return leg. Still, it was impossible to get back up to the high eight, low nine minute miles of the way out.  Once I got out of the shade and into fuller sun, I really wilted. I called it a day.

The data hides how tough this was

Initially, I was pretty disappointed with this. But I got five very strong miles out of this run, and two more that were pretty good, even though I had to really gut them out. I was certainly in hydration debt by the time I got home, drinking two pints of water straight down. 

On reflection, the better plan would have been to do a couple of four to five mile laps around town so that I could have had more shade and been able to pick up more hydration as I needed it. I could have also got out of the house 30 minutes earlier and that would have helped too. Hindsight is 20/20. 

I’m wise enough to know that not every run in the next 16 weeks is going to go my way. So it’s all good. 

Rundle 4 (and 5) Hometown trail.

 I live in a small town… I think that’s a song lyric from somewhere. Not sure, it certainly sounds familiar. No matter.

This weeks run route is pretty flat

This weeks Rundle is in my hometown. Small towns may seem a little limiting, and consequently boring in running routes. With such a limited selection of roads you’d think a runner would get bored quite quickly. 

Well, yes and no. It becomes a challenge. You start to set yourself rules. The one I use the most is you can never run the same direction on the same length of road twice in a run. You can run the road in opposite direction, but not the same way more than once. Crossing over your route is OK. Another one I use is to never do a direct U turn on the trail. If I’m on the trail and I need to turn and head home. I have to leave the trail, run on a road and rejoin the trail somewhere else, or run around a city block or two before heading back the way I came. You are allowed to double back and run a road previously run if you need an emergency stop for fluids for example.

Running around parking lots as well. Sometimes I use them, sometimes not. Circumnavigating one might add .25 of a mile or more depending on the size of the lot. 

Sometimes I’m working my route out beforehand, sometimes on the fly. It’s fun. It keeps your mind active. It turns the run into something that’s alive and evolving. I once managed a run of 15 miles around town following my rules.

You don’t always need to be obsessed with the minutiae of your run. Perhaps on a track session or a hill workout you should. But a recovery run or even a long slow run? Just be out there and relax and enjoy being out there.

So I did today. It was a bit hot out. 70 degrees apparently. This route is a simple one, not using too much brain power to create. I was on the wonderful Dakota Rail Trail for a couple of miles, and I’ll write more about that in another post. It’s just a great amenity to have. As per usual, I should have run slower. But this pace was feeling quite comfortable in the conditions. In fact I was quite shocked when I got home to find out my HR had slipped into zone 5. But that was probably down to the heat and is too much information.

Tomorrow it’s Parkrun and I’m already excited. I haven’t been for two weeks. I can’t wait.

Long Run day.

It’s all relative.

Today my long run is eight miles. Two weeks ago it was twenty. Training is now a finely tuned science, and even though I feel like I could run 20 miles or more at the drop of the hat, training plans say NO! Even for professionals. Compare this to the interview with Dick Beardsley at the end of the London Marathon in 1981, that I blogged about the other day, he had run three competitive marathons in three months. That would be frowned upon in serious marathon circles today.

 I chose to run in Norwood Young America today, not because I had run there nearly all week and enjoyed the change of scenery. But because my favourite coffee truck was in the town. I would be able to treat myself to a coffee after the run. If you follow this fledgling blog for a while, you will notice that long runs to the coffee shop are an important part of my training plans.

Running through both Norwood and Young America would give me the chance to get some pictures of the neat old ballpark I saw on Tuesday. The Norwood loop is four miles, the Young America one, three. As I needed to run eight miles today, I needed to find a mile out there. If I find I need to do this on a run, I’ll run around the perimeter of parking lots, or run a crenellated pattern through city blocks. Even running the long way around a corner can add up. Races are measured on the shortest distance around a corner. If you run the longest route around a curve, you may only add a few hundredths of a mile. But if you do that round 20 corners, then you’re well in the way to adding a quarter of a mile to your run.

As usual I started with a quick warm up at the gym before heading out. It was very breezy out there and the temperatures were only in the upper 50’s compared to the low 70’s earlier in the week. There was a positive chill in the air.

Perhaps that made me run a little quicker, just to get warm. I circumnavigated a parking lot or two to get some extra distance in the bank straight away and headed up to the old ballpark.

It’s called “Willkommen Park”. It’s from another era.

The view from the right field fence

Welcome to Willkommen Park

Wonderful message on the outer wall of the grandstand

A last look at the ballpark

I said goodbye to the park and the wind blew me down the hill. Then as I passed one of the towns many churches, I spied Elephant Joe’s truck hidden in the trees.

I can see the coffee truck. Can you?

However, I still had 5 miles to go before I could get the days caffeine fix. I carried on under the highway and became fascinated with the sound of my feet striking the tarmac echoing around the tunnel walls. So soft. Quite the surprise. I expected a harder sound. 

I ran on. 

At one point I bemoaned the lack of garbage cans on the trail as I had to carry my sticky, used Hammer Gel packet for almost a mile. 

It was an unremarkable run, which is the way you want a “long” run. Pretty quickly, I was back in the parking lot where I started. I had found enough car parks to run around to get that extra mile in.

I cooled down and headed over to the coffee truck to get my reward.

The reward

That’s it. I’m shutting down until Friday and the William A Irvin 5K. I’m going to rest a few twinges and niggles I have. They don’t bother me when running. But I’ll rest them all the same. See you at the start line of Grandmas Marathon.

Rundle (3) Baylor Regional Park. A Cross Country Rundle

Who like me, detested cross country at school? It was the winter athletic sport/method of torture, of choice when I was being educated. Running across fields, up and down hills, through farmyards, slipping and sliding in the mud. 

Ugh. Then why do I find myself looking forward to this run at Baylor Regional Park forty years later?

Mainly because it’s not cold wet and muddy. I have run my fair share of marathons on trails. Approximately 24 of the 26.2 miles of The Whistlestop marathon in Ashland, WI are on old railroad track bed, not unlike the surface at the park. I’ve run that event in the snow. I have cold weather running gear, when needed. Cross Country holds no fears for me now.

Since I learned to cross country ski earlier this year, I have spent quite a bit of time on the trails in the park getting the hang of the sport, and I love it. There’s five miles of trail here, and as that was what my training plan called for. That was what I decided to do. Run the trails that I have ski’d and snowshoe’d.

It didn’t look like this the last time I was here

Of course, everything looks totally different at the end of spring compared to the bleak midwinter when I was here skiing last. Where I felt I should run turned out to be an RV pitch, and a fire pit had appeared from nowhere. But once I got out of the camp site it was plain sailing.

The scenery was a beautiful as it was in the winter.

Nicely compacted limestone trail, comfy on the legs.

The trail heads off into the distance

I easily found the section of the trail where I had embarrassingly fallen going uphill, because my skiing skills were no match for the gradient. Another spot I recalled because it was where I fell and lost track of one of my ski’s as it sped off into the undergrowth.

The oddest thing I saw on the trail were the brushwood teepee’s in a couple of clearings in the woods. Why they were there is a mystery. It was an interesting sight to cogitate on as I jogged around the trail.

Teepee 1.

Teepee 2.

I left the woods behind and skirted Eagle Lake, the swimming beach was deserted. A few swans in the distance were pretty much the sum total of the wildlife I saw on the run. 

No swimmers today

The Observatory

One thing worth recording on the run is the Minnesota Astronomical Society’s Onan (Eagle Lake) Observatory. The M.A.S. is one of the largest astronomy societies in the USA. The observatory is sometimes open at night for star parties when you can use their telescopes to view the cosmos.

With that I headed back to the car. My Garmin came up slightly short on the distance, so I did a lap of the parking lot to bring up five miles. A relaxing run in lovely scenery. Nothing could be finer. What’s next? 

Rundle (2) Norwood

Norwood Young America or NYA, depending on your point of view, is one, or two places. Historically speaking, Young America came first, being platted in 1856. Norwood in 1872. The two settlements merged in 1972. Depending on which you live in, the settlement can be known as Norwood, or Young America. Divided by Highway 212, I think of Young America as north of the highway and Norwood south. Having run in Young America on Tuesday, and spied the highway underpass as I finished, I thought that as today was Global Running Day. I would discover Norwood.

Whats down here?

As with the previous day, I warmed up on the exercise bike in the gym for 20 minutes. Setting out, I looped around the public trail through the school grounds before hitting the underpass on my voyage of discovery. 

NYA appears to have a good selection of new trails and sidewalks, judging by those that I ran on. It was nice to have a good trail away from the highway as heavy semis and cars sped by.  
I had planned out a route of 4 miles on Google Earth. I find it a quite handy tool to use for plotting routes. The measurement of distances is accurate, and you can always take a look in Streetview to see if there are any notable features on the route, should you think you’ll get lost running in a new locale.

Is that a train I see?

As I’m a bit of a railroad enthusiast, turning onto Railroad Avenue filled me with hope that I’d see a train. But it wasn’t until I had done a loop around the strip mall and was heading back the way I came, that I spied a couple of locomotives at the head of a train on the Minnesota Prairie Line spur. It was hidden by trees, if the motors had been running, I would have for sure heard and seen it the first time!

Running on more good sidewalks I soon found myself at the ballpark fields, a very nice community facility. My Garmin had chirped at three miles, so I was pretty confident that the Google Earth prediction of 4 miles would be correct. I slalomed through the trees for good measure. 

The Karmann Ghia is the Orange/Red car in the middle

Crossing over the railroad. I hoped to hear the horn of an approaching train in the distance, but no such luck. However, on the other side of the road, I saw a small industrial unit signed as “Dune Buggy Supply”. Outside were parked a couple of VW Beetles, a pair of Microbuses, and a Karmann Ghia. I secretly covet a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. So it was pretty sweet to see one. 
That was it really. Back to the underpass, under 212, and just as I entered the gym parking lot, my Garmin chirped four miles. Excellent.
Once again, the run could be said to be a bit on the fast side, but I was having fun exploring, and I hadn’t worked too hard, despite the humidity feeling higher than the previous day.

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.