I Am Twelve Years Old (Again)

    Today (which will be yesterday  by the time you actually read this) I decided to give running yet another go and, once again, try to up the mileage just a touch.
   I gathered up and donned all the usual running accouterments and just before I left I gave my wife a kiss goodbye. As I was getting set to walk out the door, she looked at me, giggled, and said "You look like you're twelve!"
   

Me, doing my best impression
of a twelve-year-old!

At my age (not twelve) I've kind of gotten past the part of caring a whole heck of a lot about how I look anymore. This goes as much for street clothes (I believe grey goes with anything) as it does running attire. Notwithstanding all this, her comment gave me pause. I'm sure she saw me more as the young boy headed out to baseball practice or perhaps joining the Scout group or maybe even headed off trick-or-treating. I get it, I really do. Even the people on the street give me funny looks occasionally so when I finally hit the forest I do feel a little more at ease (although there was that time I was hiking through the woods and came across this young family whose three-year-old looked at me like I was Bigfoot and quite often the other hikers are wearing flip-flips and I'm dressed like I was running the Barkley Marathons but I digress...) 

This tree fell in the forest (across
the trail in Warbler) but I'm not sure
if anybody heard....

   Back to what matters. The simple plan was to make my way back to Kains Woods via Warbler Woods and run a slow 3K. Due to some right knee issues, I've very gradually been upping the mileage, having started at 1K and then 2K and today up to 3. You may have noticed a pattern and quite likely will be able to guess how far I'm running next week! The knee, which had been feeling awesome the last couple of days decided to feel not quite as awesome today (which is now yesterday) and I wondered if being out on the trails with it was even a good idea. Like a lot of other times, though, when my knee or perhaps another body part is feeling kind of iffy before or at the beginning of a run, by the time I'd run a couple hundred meters everything was fine. And because this all happened yesterday, I can tell you that the knee still feels fine today!

   

At the end of 3K's worth of
running. They don't want you
to go this way, so I didn't.

I'm not sure if global warming is the issue or not, but even this late in September we are in the midst of a heat spell that rivals easily anything that occurred mid-summer. Mid-thirties now for several days in a row. Somehow or other, I did not take this into account with my hydration and, in spite of the fact that I was wearing a hydration vest which could have accommodated two chest bottles and a bladder, I set out with only one chest bottle. Huge mistake! With the extra little bit of running and ending up just that much farther away from home, I didn't have enough water to see me back. Because of this, I ducked out of the forest as soon as I could just to avoid the extra labour and walked back along city streets, thinking that if anybody was out with a hose I might get 'em to either spray me or fill my bottle. Well, no such luck. About half a kilometer away from my place,

Cutting out of Kains Woods early.
Not a lot of fun, traversing
those large concrete blocks...

though, I did run into a house where they were watering the lawn and the sprinkler was mercifully spraying the sidewalk at the same time so I walked back and forth in it for a bit and it was heavenly. Yet another lesson learned. It was the same kind of a mistake that a twelve-year-old might have made...