The morning’s plan:
Meet friends at the parking lot for a soccer complex at 7:00 AM, run about 3.5 miles with them and turn back to complete 7 miles. Maybe do 8 miles today, if I feel like it.

I got up and ate my Lucky Charms, got dressed, filled my water bottle with some G2, decided to throw some recovery drink in my run bag as well, got in the car and drove to the meeting point.

It was in the mid 40’s when I started and the winds were blowing pretty fiercely. I’m getting really tired of the excessively strong wind gusts we’ve been having lately, but having those combined with a cold front moving through today… well, that was almost enough to make me want to stay in bed.

My friends were planning on doing 15 miles. My friend Jimmy is training for a 50K next month, the RnR in San Diego in May, a 50-miler in August and a 100-miler in the fall. So he’s got a pretty hard core training plan and as much as I love running with my friends, I am always a little concerned that I may slow them down or throw their training off since I’m just out there to run for fun right now. But that didn’t seem to be the case.

We started off, taking a nice easy pace. Things carried on for a while and before I knew it, I had already done 3 miles. I started to think I should turn back soon but Jimmy said that if I turned on a road a little further up, I should be able to just loop back around and connect to the road where we were running before.

Simple enough, right?

Except the area that we were running in was built by city planners who are on crack and thought it would be fun to put roundabouts at all the intersections. And in the middle of the roundabout is usually an island full of vegetation. So it’s just easier to follow the roundabout around.

But then, when you’re not really familiar with the area and the street signs aren’t always obvious from the runner’s point of view… well… you make mistakes. And sometimes you end up running on a street you thought you’d left once before in the opposite direction from where you were trying to go. Or you turn off on a branch that isn’t the road that you thought and suddenly everything is even more unfamiliar.

So after backtracking a few times, going past things I was 100% certain I hadn’t been by before and letting several expletives loose… I spotted a couple walking their dog and stopped to ask them directions for the easiest way to get back to my car. Their first statement, “Just head on down to that next roundabout and stick to the right…”

Um… do you have a street name I can watch for?

They did and I managed to make my way back to my car. I stopped to walk back and forth a few times and slowed down to try figuring out where I was. After all was said and done, I ended up doing 10.65 miles. I’m really glad I decided to throw some kind of recovery drink in my car, because I was pretty thirsty/hungry when I finished and at least that gave me something to consume before getting back home.

So perhaps it was longer than I had planned, but I still had a pretty good run and I feel accomplished… haven’t run that far for a while and it felt good to prove to myself that I’ve still got some distance in me.

And since the title of this post is taken from a Ratt song… enjoy this music video for the song ‘Round and Round’. I love glam rock – those dudes know how to work the hairspray better than I ever have and they’ve got some great high kicks!