Home Run

Today's run was an easy run that was not so easy.

I wanted to get in 10 miles so I could have 70 for the this week. That called for one of my bread and butter loops for when I'm visiting my mom's, which takes me up into the foothills of the Palisades Interstate Park, down into the ruins of Letchworth Village, and back through Thiells, Garnerville and Stony Point. These are haunts of my childhood, and each time I run this loop or a variation of it I notice things, sometimes big and sometimes small, that have changed. I guess it comes with growing older, where the hometown becomes more one of memory and less one of fact.

One thing that doesn't change is the hilliness of the terrain. Much more up and down than what I'm used to, especially the protracted uphills that make up much of the first four miles of this run. I wonder how different a runner I would be if I lived here and trained regularly on these roads. Today I took them easy and tried to make this as much a recovery run as possible.

My watch still lies at home, forgotten, so its 10 miles in somewhere between one and two hours.