Portland

Home again, this time from Portland, Oregon. Had a meeting there with other people who work with information systems and data on homeless services. Pretty geeky, I know, but it’s fun spending a day with a group of people who are deeply involved in the same esoteric subject. In that it has parallels to Boston.

It also had parallels in that there were several runners among us. I was invited to join a group that was heading out after the meeting was over at 4:30. I didn’t bring any running stuff on the trip, but had some old trainers for walking around shoes and a pair of shorts to sleep in. That with a shirt and I was good to go. Four of us met up and took the light rail from our downtown hotel to the Washington Park stop. This stop sits in a tunnel 300 feet under a hill, and you take an elevator to the top where you come out by the zoo and a network of trails.

Brett and I took the Woodland Trail on a modified (by our difficulty in following the path) out and back (and up and down) to the Pittock Mansion on top of a hill that provided a panoramic view of Portland. The afternoon was clear enough to see the city, but the muddiness of the trail (and, eventually, my calves) spoke to the wet climate here. The running was good, and the legs feel rested again. This supports my framing of Monday as a long run in preparation for Broad Street (10 mile run) next weekend.

Speaking of Boston, thank you for all the comments and support. I’ve never gotten in the double-digits in comments on a post. More people followed me online and poignantly described their concern as my 5k splits got slower. And I got much affirmation for my theory that, hey, these races happen and, if anything, it’s surprising that its taken me 12 marathons to a meltdown. Seems most runners, regardless of ability, have a bad marathon story, and now I have one too.

Total run time was about 65 minutes, call it 7 miles.