Not the right kind of "cold, wet one"!

   I was checking my stats on Blogger just yesterday and what it told me was that there had been no page views that day and there had been no page views the previous day, either. This meant that people had stopped even accidentally reading my blog and was a sure sign that I had not written anything in a long, long time.

   

Out of the reasonably clear...

I really only blog when I run and I had not run in about four weeks, partially due to a nasty head and chest cold and then a stream of social commitments, not the least of which was my wife's 50th birthday. Today, however, was a day in which nothing had been planned and my legs were feeling kind of restless and so I thought let's give 'em a go!

   We have been through a long, bleak and wet spell in these parts lately and today was no different. Rain was in the forecast but by the time I was ready to go there was nothing more than a wet mist going on out there. I threw on a light running jacket just before I headed out the door, it wasn't really cold enough for one (it was 8C) but the mist just seemed to make it feel that much colder.

...and headed into the dark and dismal.

   I headed to Komoka Park, hoping to be able to park for free at the far end of it and, with the nasty weather today, this seemed like a pretty good bet. Sure enough, lots of room to park and off I went. My normal routine is to walk the first half a kilometer before breaking into a run and this is what I did today. I was a little worried after being off for four weeks that my legs wouldn't respond and was pleasantly surprised when they reacted appropriately.

If you're from around these parts
and do any kind of hiking or
even reading about it, then you've
probably seen this tree. It has all
sorts of  love notes on it but today,
in the wet gloom, it looked kind
of antediluvian and foreboding

   I wanted to run 7K today and had a bit of a rough idea what portion of the park I would use for this. About 3K in, though, it started to rain in earnest. This was no really big deal but then, when I looked down at my Garmin, it had switched from the usual screen telling me time and distance and had reverted to screen which shows me how my virtual run partner was doing. This would have been okay if perhaps I had set this up beforehand but i hadn't (I rarely use this option) and in fact my virtual partner today was riding a bike. And I was 24 minutes behind him/her. This was not helpful and, in the rain, I had a lot of trouble getting the Garmin back to the correct screen. When I eventually got back to the screen I needed, everything had been set back to zero!

   This, on its own, did not stop me from continuing my run but soon my ankle and Achilles started to act up and then I just lost my, for lack of a much better word, mojo. At that point, I turned around and walked it back in. No, I hiked it back in, that sounds better.

   By the time I made it halfway back, I was drenched. My running jacket is not rainproof and provided little comfort. It was only about 3 p.m. but it was dark in the forest and I actually started to run again just to get back to the car a little faster.
   So, as it turned out, I did not get my 7K run in and, really, this was fine by me. I had assuaged that restless feeling and this was the main purpose of getting out today. Hopefully, I can now get back into a more regular routine and actually give people something to read, either by accident or on purpose!