Notes
The Great Adventure begins...
after stretching lightly and seeing old man Sanders' (who owns the ice cream parlor uptown) truck delivering the paper to Brees' across the street, I started toward my Harper Rd run only to notice I couldn't see downtown 1 block away. Off to the trail I jogged at a 10:00 pace and noticed right away I had made a wise choice.
The trail entrance still had traces of snow from the pile up from COOP and Vision Ag parking lots and a lot of lumps of frozen tire tracks that are hard to navigate. But I pressed on and found a comfortable 9:30ish pace even in the fog.
Some idiot drove his truck on the soft trail and left tracks up to the first gravel road.
The difficult thing about this run was the fog was so thick I could only see about 10 feet in front of me. So I imagined the things I could run into: face to face with a deer...or maybe a bunch of rabbits, killer rabbits...or the worst: a skunk...but no wildlife today, all was very quiet.
I heard the rumble of what reminded me of a train in the distance and thought for a second about the trail being the old Milwaulkee RR line. Not Old Milwaulkee beer, but Milwaulkee Railroad. Ghost train? What a way to meet my fate. It did get louder and louder until I noticed to my left some hog buildings in the "near" distance.
Couldn't see many landmarks at all and at times wondered if I had been running in circles. But finally crossed the 1st road and then SNOW on the 2nd part of the trail. Reminded me how much sun and warm temperatures it takes to really melt all of the snow. This only covered 1/2 the trail most of the time, but a few places I had to navigate the crunchy,hard snow. At the next crossing I thought the fog was lifting, but it was just wishful thinking. My pace at times hit 8:30-8:45, but most of the time I would look down and see 9:11. Hmmmm.... a message?
At the 3 mile mark I decided to run a time instead of a distance and went on to run 30:00 which worked out to about 3.25.
On the way back, much of the same except I could see the build up of frost on my pullover now. With it being an easy run I had overloaded my layers with probably 8lbs of gear so I was warm.
Much of the same Twilight Zone atmosphere on the way back, except one sound of an animal moving in the brush...my childhood nemesis? ....
Bigfoot! Well, I couldn't see for sure, but I'm sure it was the Sasquatch. To give you an idea of just how foggy it was and just how terrible it was. At the 2nd gravel road crossing on the way back, I went off course into the ditch to the right of the trail. So I got lost crossing a gravel road. Amazing. Everytime I cross a road I thought of the hundreds of times I had crossed those dirt or gravel roads and only about 4 or 5 times had I seen a vehicle. It was so quiet, the loudest sounds by far were my shoes and my breathing, so I would have heard a vehicle. And I was right.
About a 1.5 miles to go and I thought it was foggy enough they may delay school. So what would I do with the extra time? Sleep? No, because about 8am they are coming in to put in the new counter top so I need to be up. Well, I could always write a longer log than usual for my run this morning. Sounds good. And with that my pace had slipped again and I brought it back up to speed. My Garmin beeped at me...6 mile mark...home was close, but this run seemed to take forever. I could now see the lights of Vision Ag and Coop...no cars or trucks in sight as I crossed countyline road and passed the track/FB field, passed Fagen Elevator...even Dean's shop was dark or too far away to see the light. As I pulled up to the house I saw 6.49 and kept jogging up to the door on the patio 6.5...OK good enough.
Got inside and fired up the computer to see "Washington Schools delayed 2hrs"...Yes...but what's this? I hadn't been gone 60 minutes at all...The date was Feb. 2, 2072.
On the dining room table a pile of letters, magazine articles and newpaper articles about ..."a rural Iowa schoolteacher is still missing after an early morning run on Feb. 2, 2012. Local rescue efforts were called off today, just two weeks after 43 year old Craig McClenahan went missing. Local police Chief Doug Conrad, "This community is stunned right now and yet they pulled together like they always do in situations like this. Craig could usually be seen in the mornings with a bright green safety vest and a head lamp either on the Harper Rd or the KeWash trail and we had hundreds of people combing the area from here to Harper and the trail all the way to West Chester. And now comes the tough part about saying goodbye to someone who came to us from Sigourney 20 years ago, but is just as much a part of Keota as anyone who's lived here all their lives. I mean I guess there's still an outside chance he might show up somewhere, but this is really strange. No clues anywhere that he would be leaving, all his ID and money are still here, the only things missing are some of his running clothes, his headlamp, vest, a pair of shoes and his running watch. It's like he just vanished." Just then I heard little feet running down the stairs and a little boy who reminded me of my son Tanner as a kid looked at me and said, "Are you my great grandpapa?" I looked in the mirror and saw a man who looked to be 103...well, since I was in good shape, maybe 97.
OK, well, it's the start of a good story. Similar to Cast Away.
Mile splits: 9:46/9:06/9:05/9:01/8:59/8:55/4:23 (8:46) Wow...always getting faster.