[Monday: 3.2 miles; Wednesday: 3.2 miles]
I ran on Monday morning. But in the evening I “managed” a local training run in town.
We used to have a small group that did a 5k hill run on Wednesday evenings in the summer. That kind of went away. But in the last little while I’ve been thinking about resurrecting it.
The course is interesting. We start at the bottom of a hill. This is in town with rectangular blocks of not uniform size. The bottom of the hill is College Ave and 1st St South. We go up the hill travelling on 1st St South, past 3rd Ave, then 5th Ave, 6th, 7th, and 8th. Then we turn left and go a block to 2nd St South and travel north back to College Ave and the block west back, and downhill, to the start. The start/finish is the lowest point on the course.
If you do the rectangle including 8th Ave, then do the rectangle including 7th Ave, then 6th Ave, etc you will have gone up the hill 5 times and the total distance is 3.1 miles.
So I advertised and 6 people showed up to run it on Monday. It was fun.
I added some fun features. I put some painted clothes pins out, with a different color for each loop. The runners collect the clothes pins and end up with 5 of them. I don’t care which direction they do the course, or in which order they do the loops. They just have to collect all of the clothes pins (and come by the start/finish line each time). I bought some 2-gal buckets and painted stripes on some of the buckets that match the clothes pins. The painted buckets are at the turn points, so they can tell which street has which color pins without running it… in case they forget. The pins are clipped on the rim of an unpainted bucket and I put the pin buckets at about half way on the short segments.
People seemed to enjoy that.
We are on vacation for a long Memorial Day weekend so starting the next week, after I get back, I’m going to try to do this every Monday evening for the summer, with maybe a break or two that I might hand off to someone else.
