LTD

It was a great weekend to be outside and we did plenty of that. My two training runs went well and then Sunday we got out for a mountain bike ride. I know fall weather (aka rain) is coming so I'm soaking up the sun while I can.

Friday

5.0 miles/45:38/9:08 average pace

Easy solo run

Saturday

15.0 miles/2:14:03/8:56 average pace

So, this run was unexpectedly an ass-kicker. We ran an out and back along Terwilliger Blvd through southern Portland to Lake Oswego. There's an asphalt path separate from the road for most of the way. In some cases, you can't even see or hear the road and are running through a forest. For a couple miles, though, it is just sidewalk through a busy part of town which was kind of annoying (concrete was hard on the legs, stopping for intersections was a pain, etc). The one thing that was consistent for the entire distance: HILLS. Omg. I know I am kind of a wimp when it comes to hills but this run was tough. It was rolling the entire way, so there was no relief when we reached the turnaround. In fact, at that point we faced about 3 miles of uphill. I wanted to barf. We ran slowly, like 9:30s, for a lot of miles with some faster splits when we had more down than up. As we neared the end we knew we had two miles of basically downhill to the car, so we pushed hard. I didn't think there was any way we'd finish the run with under 9:00 average pace, but the last two miles did it: 7:50 and 7:33. Zach was a huge help as always, pushing me along and not letting me complain too much. This was his longest run ever so big props to him.

total miles for the week: 39

Sunday, we took our new mountain bikes out to get dirty. I found a pretty mild trail, the Klickitat Rail Trail, to test my mtn. biking skills. Zach has done this before, but I've only ever really been mountain biking a couple of times back in Montana several years ago. We drove a little over an hour east of Portland to a little town in Washington just across the Columbia from Hood River. We ended up doing 11.2 miles total in about an hour and a half and had a blast. I think I'm ready to try some tougher trails because the few tricky sections were my favorite parts. Here's a few pictures. The second one is really interesting- we didn't know what it was at the time, but found out that those platforms are used by tribal fisherman who get exclusive access to this salmon-rich river. It was very cool.

After the ride, we loaded up the bikes and drove over to Hood River. It's a super cute little town with a few outdoor shops and several breweries. We had a beer at a little pub and talked to the bartender for a while. It's a very friendly town. I had a Full Sail (one of the breweries in town) LTD Lager- LTD for "living the dream" :) Cheers.