Go, you chicken fat, go away!

This was a recovery run.  From what I hear, the elite Kenyans run their recovery runs at an 11:00 minute pace.  So I must be doing pretty good.

Well, the plan was to run 1.5 Tuesday, which I did, 2.5 Wednesday, fail, and 3.5 Thursday, also fail.  I got dressed Tuesday but I wasn't feeling good, so I never made it out the door.  I'm a little embarrassed to say that I wore that same outfit for the next three days until I finally ran today.

Mike and I decided to run 9.2 miles today.  That means running all the way to the top of Usery Pass and continuing down to the Usery Park entrance, then turning around.  I couldn't find my headlamp this morning, but usually Mike brings an extra.  His daughter Megan came today, too.  She was just going to do 5.4 miles which she says she did.  I told Mike I couldn't find my light, but maybe he tought I was looking for it and couldn't find it, but then I found it, because he never offered to let me use the flashlight he always holds.  So he literally had two, and I had none.  Anyway, we started running together and I thought it might be a good idea to stick with him so I could run in the protection of his soft glowing haze.  But he was much too fast for me.  I would have to be extra cautious since all I had was my blinky LED light on my back.  I kept my head up as cars were coming.  And man, there was a lot of traffic today!  It was a bit annoying.  One scary part was when a vehicle had just passed me and I could see another one coming.  I could also hear voices coming out of it.  I wondered if they were having a good time yelling at Mike up the way.  It looked like they were in the bike lane so I moved over.  Just then I realized they were bikes and they were yelling at me to get out of the way.  It was weird.  Usually it's easy to tell the difference between an bike and a car.  Anyway, after that I would just get off the road into the dirt any time I saw a pair of headlights coming at me.  I figured a pair of bruised knees was better than a broken body or a crushed skull.  That turned out to be a great decisision as one jack wagon was driving in the bike lane and would have wiped me out.  I was feeling good just taking it nice and easy.  I got to the top no problem and started heading down.  Not long after that a guy passed me running on the other side of the road.  Not sure how far he had gone, but he was cruising.  That's when I realized I probably should've been running on that side of the road.  There was far less traffic and they would at least be able to see my blinky light.  Oh well.  At 0.4 miles before the turn around I saw Mike.  That means he put 0.8 miles in between us.  A little before I got to the park entrance I saw the fast guy coming back towards me.  I contemplated giving him five, but he went way over in the dirt.  When I turned around I could feel a significant headwind.  Bleh!  0.9 miles of uphill into the wind.  But I just kept going.  I kept seeing more and more runners.  There's hardly ever this many runners out.  They're probably training for the Phoenix Marathon.  The downhill was nice.  My legs were getting tired, but I kept reminding myself of how much I'd already ran and how little was left.  I had to stop once to dump a rock out of my shoe, but I felt relatively comfortable the whole way.  Did you hear what I said?  There was no discomfort!!  But when I finished Mike said, "Burt, are you bleeding?"  I look down at my shirt and sure enough, I was bleeding.  Body Glide, you have failed this city!