Back and Forth And Back And Forth On The White Trail

Just some of the scenery!

   I went for what seems to have become my weekly trail run again yesterday, once more at Komoka Provincial Park. It's a big enough park that you can visit it several times and still find little side trails and parts of it you haven't seen yet. So off I went!
   My plan was to run a full 10K and just stay on the white trail. The white trail runs from one end of the park to the other. Any other time I've been there, as much as I have run has been 8K so I wanted to up the mileage a bit.
   My plan was to have gone out Saturday so I had  filled a 1 liter container about 2/3 full and stuck it in the freezer, hoping that it would end up being slushy by the time I went out. Unfortunately, due to rain, I didn't make it out til yesterday and the 1L container now held a solid chunk of ice. I figured it would melt while I ran so I filled it up the rest of the way and headed off.

Half-way done and already tired!

   My real simple plan was to run the white trail from one end of the park to the other and just keep doing this until I reached my 10K. It was a pretty nice day to run, sunny and warm (a little too warm, maybe) and most of the trail had dried up from Saturday's rain. 

One end of the park....

   Being a sunny Sunday, it was also pretty busy. I kind of enjoy it when there are lots of people on the trails, it makes for friendly banter as you pass them. Today, because of all the back and forth running I was doing, I would pass the same groups of people multiple times. It almost gives you the time to build up a.....relationship, I guess you could call it!

The Thames always makes a good pic

   Remember my frozen 1L container? Well, it never melted, at least not all the way, and I very quickly used up all the drinkable water it had in it. After that, the water only came out in dribs and drabs, a little hard to re-hydrate that way!

Love this part

   Round about 9K, things started to seize up just a touch with both of my quads and my left calf. Not sure if it had anything to do with my (lack of) water supply at that point or whether it was just because it was the longest I had actually run in about two years. When you consider the terrain---steep, twisting, root-infested hills with boulders---it was probably the roughest run I've ever had and my lower extremities felt like they had iron rods running though them by the time I got back to the car (wasn't entirely sure I was going to be able to get in the car!)

And a totally un-related random pic of my two sons---Ben
and Bryant, at the World Cup game between Canada
and the Czechs! We won!

   As much as I'm enjoying the trails these days, I probably to need to get back out there on the streets for some shorter runs. Running just the once a week doesn't really do the trick!