Hit those trails

Bloated pressurized eyelid or no, I needed a run this evening. I went all out and donned my new Ultimate Direction Wasp hydration pack, filled with 48 oz of tap water with a dissolved Nuun tablet. The best thing about the pack is how much storage is built into the front of the straps, with easy mesh pockets for my MP3 player and a cell phone, and bigger pockets for gels or whatever else. There’s a lot more storage in back, of course, but it’s great to have the room up front. The worst thing about the pack, so far, is the awkward machinations needed to refill the bladder. Straps, the tube, a Velcro loop — it’s all a little unwieldy.

So with the sun setting, I hit the trails around OHSU and in the Marquam Nature Park for an hour:

Only five miles, but three and a half were on trails with significant hills. I jogged slowly, but I never stopped jogging. I had a clip-on LED flasher to be seen by and a handheld flashlight to see with, which I needed by the second half of the run. The trails were wet but not too muddy, and the rain held off while I was out. Once I got back to Terwilliger (that last little uphill in the elevation map above), running suddenly seemed easy enough: kind of funny, because that “little” uphill has seemed pretty big in the past.

This was the first time I’ve run on trails in the dark. It may sound like a really stupid thing to do. Maybe it is. But if I’m ever going to run 100-mile races, I’ll need the practice. And it’s kind of fun.