All Downhill From Here

Last night I picked up Dawn and her granddaughter and we headed off to the Calgary Roadrunners Beer and Pizza social run at the Calgary Sailing Club by the Glenmore Reservoir. If you’ve never been to Calgary you might be a little surprised to learn that yes, here in this dry expanse of prairie, we do have enough water in one place to float a sailing club. Just barely, but we do.

Dawn and her cute tot opted to stay fairly close to the clubhouse and do a longish walk at the little one’s speed. I hooked up with Yolanda and Linda to run around the reservoir, about 16 km/10 miles.

We set off shortly after 4:30, plenty of time for us to run all the way around the reservoir and be back in time to stretch before pizza at 7. It was a beautiful evening for a run – maybe 8C/46F with a brisk breeze. After about 18 minutes of running we took our first walk break, tied our outer layers around our waists and then I set my watch to beep for walk breaks at 10/1 s.

Our route took us in to the Weaselhead first. We stayed on a paved path the whole way. If you’d like an idea of some of the scenery where we ran, I recommend this site. I left my camera in the car.

At about 50 minutes we took an eating walk break – I had a chocolate chip cookie I’d brought from home. It was just the lift I needed. Linda chuckled as she spotted her husband running towards us as we ate and walked. He had chosen to run around the res in the other direction, and she knew that when he got there he’d ask her if she had eaten to keep her sugar level up. She’s a Type 1 diabetic and has to watch that pretty closely.

We ran on towards the dam, up across a pedestrian bridge and then down under the causeway. As we headed back up a big hill I was chatting with Yolanda about her upcoming race, the Police Half (map of course on this site) , and she waffled a bit. She wasn’t sure she had trained quite enough and hedged about doing it. Just as she expressed her dubiousness about the whole thing, we ran past a raised manhole cover on which someone had carefully stencilled the grafitti *commit*. I saw it and pointed it out, and we laughed so hard we ended up walking up the rest of the hill.

Just as we passed Heritage Park Dianne met us on her bike. She’d come out to meet us with her youngest in the double bike trailer, and chatted with us for our last half hour. She could tell I was getting tired towards the end because I wasn’t picking up my knees. She was right; by then I was quite ready to be done, but it felt good to finish!

I usually do my long runs all by my lonesome, so I really appreciated the great time we had together on our run. The company sure helped the time go by a lot faster. I need to do more of these!

We settled into the clubhouse, stretched changed, ate pizza and visited with other Roadrunners. I like these events. No clock, but still a good run and a chance to connect with other club members.