Ja Ja - It's been a while

 I have a whole lot of catching up to do with this blog - a late May/early June trip to Michigan, our VaughanMiller family back together again in mid-June after 19 months without a Sasha in the house, creeping out of COVID-19 seclusion with many family and friend visits (mostly outdoors, small groups,  but visits none-the-less).

But! In the meantime, this weekend's running was so much fun I figured I'd skip over the catching up exercise (perhaps to post later) and revel in the weekend runs. I'm not 100% sure why I am so excited about these runs, but I suspect it is due to equal parts of running shoulder to shoulder with running buddies again and, well, actually running rather than slogging/jogging/dogging. So many of my runs over the last many months have been me and Taz lazily cruising around the town - he sniffing at every opportunity and me sightseeing, head swiveling every which way as we clop clop down the streets and trails. 

This weekend offered up a distinct change in the routine.

Saturday: a meet up with Connie and Anita at the South Boulder Creek trail for a 5 x 5 minutes hard/2 minutes easy interval workout. As usual, Connie was off in the lead, but Anita and I were right on each other's shoulders as we pushed through the 5-minute surges. An excellent workout indeed!

Connie cruises ahead (far, far ahead!):

A quick pic during our 2-minute rest interval with South Boulder Creek in the background:

A warm-down pic of a flower-filled meadow. We talked about those flowers. It turns out that what is often referred to as "queen anne's lace", is known as "dog biscuits" in Sweden (Anita's home country) and as "cow's breath" in the southern United States. 

I hereby dub this meadow: DogCowBiscuitBreath Meadow.

Today/Sunday: Connie and I ran to Longmont via a combination of country roads, trails and the LoBo trail - a run we've done several times in the past (but almost exactly 2 years since we last ran this together). Today's run was by far the most entertaining with many interesting tidbits. 

• To start off with, our first mile or so was along a road that was under construction but still open to traffic. No daydreaming here!
• Early in this stretch, we saw a new trail/bike path! And a mile or so further, we saw where that new trail would come out! Next time we will be on that trail and avoid the road all together!
• Also along this stretch is a farm that is always full of surprises. Today, oreo cows (alas, no pics) and alpacas!

•  From here we zig and zag on trails and onto the roads of a golf club neighborhood where a fox very kindly posed for a photo.
  

• Upon leaving that neighborhood, we typically pick up trails again but what's this?! A trail closed sign?!?! What are we to do? Fortunately, a map attached to the trail closed signage highlighted a detour route which took us briefly through another neighborhood, a quiet little park and onto a section of the LoBo trail that our usual route bypasses - and it's a lovely stretch of trail with trees  to the right and views of the foothills and Continental Divide to the left.
• The rest of the run continued along the LoBo trail, a soft easy running surface that offered up two little surprises today: a frog that Connie's foot narrowly missed (whew!) and a bright green caterpillar that I totally missed seeing but sharp-eyed Connie (who apparently had decided to carefully watch her foot placement after the frog incident) had spotted. Out came the camera once again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• The LoBo, trail after winding its way north/northeast, veers solidly east signifying that we are on the home stretch. I don't know what got into Connie at this point but we seemed to be moving quicker and quicker and quicker, dropping our pace by about a minute per mile. As Connie sped up I had a head to heart talk with myself saying I was not going to allow myself to ease back and be lulled by Connie's swishing ponytail. Nope! Nope! Today I was going to stay on her shoulder and my little feet somehow picked up the pace as well. A great finish to our 12 mile run!
• Speaking of finish, spouses and Taz were waiting for us at the finish line (park) - as were the magnificent metal ants. Another photo op!