But that's a hill

During the summer it gets very crowded in Danville on Thursday nights. There's the regular farmers market, which in comparison to most other markets is pretty sparse. Still, the parking lot and streets are fuller than normal. Something like every other Thursday they have a Hot Summer Night celebration which started as a car show and became a place where apparently every resident of the town shows up to see and be seen. The streets near the downtown area are a mess, tempers are flaring, it's hard to get there and risky to run. Pam and I decided to move our summer staging area to the Park and Ride. Much better. Of course, we had to tweak our course too. I mapped out a route that included more of our older route, but which didn't include the closed part of the trail or the downtown area at all.

We met at our usual time and trotted out onto the street. We found that we can use the school grounds for stretching so we're not just stopping on someone's lawn. We made a left instead of a right, another left, got back to Sycamore and, oh yeah, I remember that hill! We haven't run it in quite a while. As we started up I told Pam to go ahead, I was going to go slowly and walk if I had to. That was the plan, but except for the last block I was right behind her, gasping away. I ran the whole thing, got to the top, and we turned around and started running right back down. No breaks. I decided to take a break at the bottom instead. Then we forgot to take a break.

We ended up with a little over 4 miles, run at about a 12:00 pace. I was very very tired. For a week when I intended to take it a bit easy, because of the long run tomorrow, I didn't do a very good job. I'm going to have to try to start slowly tomorrow. Good luck with that!

There was an earthquake in Oakland very early this morning but I don't think I felt it. I remember waking a couple times in the night, one time having to jump out of bed to put pressure on my cramping foot, but I never looked at the clock and miracles of miracles I fell back asleep each time. Hopefully this is a one timer and it won't have bunches of aftershocks.

No knitting last night, I never even picked up the needles. My right hand has been bothering me a little, kinda sore and crampy and dropping things. I decided that since I was exhausted from the run too I may as well take a night off. If it had eyes I could imagine my Cider Moon scarf looking sadly at me as I neglected it.

I thought I'd throw in a picture of my pretty yard before summer happened. It's very sad that the only time my yard is very pretty is late winter and early spring. My gardeners have continued their destruction mode. They took a hedge trimmer to my jasmine, before it had stopped blooming, and now it looks like some mad animal chewed its way through the leaves. One of these days I have to start another search for a new gardener but I had no luck last year when I tried.

In preparation for Potter I decided to read the last 50 pages of the last book, just to jog my memory of what happened. Oh yeah, I remember all that! I'm ready now, ready to spend my weekend after the run reading away. Hmm, I wonder if I can read the whole thing this weekend. I also wonder if I'll take time to sleep. I'll let you know!