The watch can only do so much....

Hey! If you're reading this you've survived another Monday, so there's a major plus. The rest of our weekend went great. We got a lot of rest and watched a ton of episodes of Lost. That's a great show!! We're still only about halfway through the season, so we have a lot of episodes to watch so don't spoil it for me!

Our 11-miler on Sunday went great. We started out about halfway between the two parks. That way we could stop at our car on the way back from the first park and exchange our empty Fuel Belt bottles for some full ones. Since it gets so dark on us we'd also be doing the darker, more tree dense part of the course first. Sometimes we are actually pretty smart! So, we ran from the Trailhead off Weakley Lane first, then through Sharp Springs park and back out to the car. The same spot we saw 2 deer last week we saw 2 deer again! We also saw several more deer within Sharp Springs park, near the soybean fields. As nice as it is to have these greenways they're all out and back courses, no loops, so everything you see once you see again. Once we were back at our car the Forerunner told me we were barely north of 6 miles, the Nike CV10 was only .1 miles behind the Forerunner so we were pretty happy about that. We each checked our mileage and decided we would have to turn around at 8.7 miles to complete the 11. Once we ran through the outer portion of Smyrna Rec Park we headed toward the main portion. There's a trail that juts out just before the main entrance we'd never run before so we decided to try it out. It was pretty dark by then, so it was a bit hard to see. Unfortunately smell doesn't go hand in hand with sight. Ugh, I forgot someone had told us this path goes right past the water treatment plant. I have a weak running stomach to begin with, and that smell didn't help. I could probably suck it up around 3-4 miles, but at 8 it's a tough smell. Funny thing is, Brent didn't smell it at all! Go figure. The truly terrible thing was that I knew we'd have to turn around at some point and smell it again. Anyway, once we did turn around I picked up my pace a bit. I wanted to stay with Brent, so that meant doing more of a 10:30 mile versus the 9:30 I prob would have done on my own. Once we were near the end I picked up my pace because I knew he would make it just fine on his own. In Mile 10 I even managed a sub 8 minute mile! Crazy! The main reasons I started booking it were a) it was dark b) I was tired of running c) I was hungry d) I was sick of clearing the park of spiderwebs with my sweaty body and e) seeing the skunk helped. Yup, a skunk citing. My county is way up there on the listing of places where skunks are plentiful, especially rabid ones. Last summer we had a skunk sighting EVERY night we ran. Seriously. But we haven't seen one all summer until yesterday, we've smelled a few but haven't had a single sighting. At this point I was running on my own, and it was right to the left of the trail as you headed into the last really treed, very dark, portion of the trail. At first I just thought it was a possum (yeah, we have those, too). Then I realized it was way too furry for a possum. So, out of the reasons for my kicking 10th mile time #e rated pretty high. Anyway, right past the skunk I heard my fab watch beep for the 11th mile. WTF?? I still had the rest of the loop around the rehab center and the sidewalk back to the car??? In the end we ended up doing 11.5 miles. It's totally our fault because we didn't exactly figure the turnaround point from our car, we apparently didn't start doing the math until .25 mile from our water stop. Go figure, you can buy a girl a GPS watch but if she's not smart enough to figure out how to use it it's her own fault!!

Well, it's time for me to get some sleep!!

Rachel

Exercise-
Sunday - 11 mile run
Monday 1 mile am walk with Pippin, (I had a hair appointment tonight so no exercise! Everyone needs a rest day sometimes....)