Week ending February 12

2/6  4 miles at Cottonwood

2/7  7 miles at Croft. Sometimes you have runs, like last week’s version of this mid-week run, where you just glide, feeling like you’re floating. Other days it doesn’t seem to come so easy. I felt like I was backing down a few different times today, but ended up running 15 seconds faster than last week on the same loop.

from Dairy Ridge: New Edition to Lake Johnson Connector to Palmetto 

2/8 3 miles easy.

2/9 7 miles around the neighborhood. Another good and quick run. I ran mostly on the roads today, something I haven’t done for a long while. I could really feel the difference in the toe-off today: asphalt gives back much more than dirt.

2/10 3 miles easy

This stuff is pretty nice, and makes a
lot of sense for public fields. 

2/11 7 miles on the Swamp Rabbit Trail in Greenville including 2 miles barefoot. Quinn had an audition today, so I ran for the first time on the Swamp Rabbit, a terrific rail conversion that goes about 17.5 miles between Greenville and Traveler’s Rest, SC. Plans are for the trail to extend even farther. Passed one of those new artificial turf fields, so I stopped on the way back for some very comfortable barefoot running.

2/12 12 miles at Croft. Ran with Gordon and Carol B., both of whom had awesome races at Harbison and ran much faster than I. So I made sure they were damn worn out before we started: Gordon had run for an hour-and-a-half when we met up, and Carol had run 1:40 in the morning. I did feel particularly spunky, though, and ran hard off the front most of the run on the hilly trails we took. Gordon loves to push, and came up on me a couple a times (the guy’s is a beast these days), and pulled away from me when he led a bit. 

Even though I was running hard, I tried to make it feel easy and light. But coming down the Palmetto Trail at the end, with its couple of hard climbs, has been feeling especially fast lately. I ran it on Tuesday, too, and include it in most of my Croft runs. 

from Dairy Ridge: Palmetto to TC’s to that lake trail to Lake Johnson Connector to Palmetto 

Total 43 miles in seven runs