The "Veering The Wrong Way" 9k Run

   It is Saturday today and Saturdays are when I do my long runs. Over the last few weekends I have been slowly working my way up to the 10k distance by adding one more kilometer to the length of my long runs. Today I ran 9k.
   I mapped out a route which took me from my house in the northwest end of Byron to the easternmost parking lot in Springbank Park, at which point I would simply turn around and run back.


Storybook Gardens--take the top path, not the bottom one...

   When I picked the route, I was looking for something fairly flat. I wasn't interested in a hill workout, I just wanted to be able to run the distance. What I got was a hill workout.
   In looking at a map of Springbank Park, there are essentially only two routes which get you from one end to the other. There's a route down along the river and there's another route which takes you up closer to Springbank Drive. The running is fairly flat until you get almost to Storybook Gardens, at which point you veer off to the left or veer off to the right. I veered off to the right, as this was the course I'd chosen.
   I really don't know what I was thinking. I grew up in London and have been to Springbank Park several hundred times. I absolutely know you're going to run into hills if you veer off to the right and, yet, I veered off to the right.
   I think that when I tried to visualize the route in my head it just seemed like a more scenic route. This is possibly true but I neglected to actually run the course, in my head. The hills were killer. The nature of hills, of course, is that for every one you run up you then get to run back down it on the way back. What's not taken into account, though, is that running down a hill closer to the beginning of a run means that you're going to have to run back up it when you're just that much more tired, on your way back. This is what happened to me today. There is a hill just east of where the deer enclosure used to be (if you're familiar with the park) which was delightful to run down but then became a monster to climb back up. It was the steepest hill I've ever had to ascend.
   So I ended up with more of a workout than I had originally planned but it's hard to complain about a workout of any kind. The point is I survived quite nicely and got that 9k distance out of the way!

If you veer the wrong way in Sprinbank, a man with a tire may try to run you down

   After the hilly portion of the run was over, I was running along the flat portion toward the park exit. All of the sudden, I am almost run down by a runaway flat tire which some man had been rolling down the snowy field, hit the curb of the roadway and bounce right in front (almost on top) of me. The man apologized, sort of, and continued to push the tire ahead of me, on the roadway, making it necessary to run around him. Strangest incident I have encountered so far!