The sun is up, the air is fresh, the stone is old

Long run from Trenton along the Delaware Canal State Park Trail.  Once again, can't believe how incredible this trail is.  60 miles of soft trail with cool stuff to see the entire way.  Ran through Jersey up into New Hope, Pennsylvania.  Another run through history today going by John Fitch's gun shop, the old Hessian troop barracks, the museum at Washington Crossing, and the unknown soldier's graves of the Continental Army at Thomson Neely,

The run felt good, averaged 7:53 pace.  Soft and fat like the Pillsbury doughboy but getting stronger.

Ben Lomond Peak trail from Mantua. Seriously awesome day.

Coldwater Canyon above my house climbing up to the 8,700 level.

An interesting day to say the least. About a year ago I noticed a dramatic decrease in my ability to train any speed. Actually in my ability to recover from hard training. I pretty much attributed it to overtraining. I just shifted gears into some other things like more trail running and picked up surfing. Really didn't miss the road stuff that much, there was just so much else to do. In March I had a series of blood work done for a new life insurance policy. The tests came back with some issues, markers I guess for bacterial infections in the blood. White count through the roof. So over the last several months when I had a spare hour, I've been back in for more tests. Hate doctors and stuff. Last week I got a call from the specialist that they had a fairly good idea it was Lyme disease. What? Sure enough today results were back and it's a 99.9% So I'm on some kind of antibiotic from hell now, along with a few other things.

I've no idea if this affected my running. But I do know that as serious runners we tend to know our bodies better than the average person. If you know something is off, you better get it checked out. This process of getting rid of this from my system will take a few months. Would have been much quicker a year ago.

Easy run cut short because I got sick. Stupid antibiotics.

First race in a long time it seems. I didn't worry about pace today just wanted to hit as close to max effort as I could. Hung with Clyde and Justin for a few miles and enjoyed running a pace again just about 5:10. Then I settled into my own thing and traded places a few times with Lindsey as we ran down the canyon. I lost a lot of time in the last three miles of the race but overall really stoked about the run. Good start to getting back into it.

Got to work this morning and my flight was canceled. So I headed down to Provo to attempt running up to Cascade Peak from Provo canyon and the ridgeline all the way to Hobble Creek. From Vivian Park I ran through South Fork and up Bunnell Basin. A complete Bushwack jumping logs and crawling through dense brush. The worst I have ever done. Took nearly 2.5 hours to create Cascade Peak and head to Lightning Peak. On Lightning I noticed some developing storm clouds and sat out a squall for an hour under a ledge. By now I called off the run and turned around. It actually seemed slower going down than up and somehow I ended up taking the wrong canyon down towards Provo Canyon ending up on a huge cliff. So I had to climb back up and by now had a headlamp on. It just got too dangerous by now and I dug a bed and settled in for the night. Very cold and long night, first time stuck on a mountain for a while.

Got up when it was light enough to see where I was going and got the heck off the mountain.