It was a beautiful morning in Mississippi today.  When I left on my run it was in the mid 40’s F.  Pretty strong breeze so I was a little chilly but that’s okay.

When I left the house, it was my intention to run 7 miles.  No big deal, just a nice run.

On this route, I cross over railroad tracks three times.  Over the years, I have perfected the art of running across those tracks.  Depending on which set you are crossing, well, it is different each time.

One set has large gaps between the ties and the rails.  One has large rocks that have drifted onto the road bed but if you know this, there is an easy way to run around those rocks.  If you hit one, they really hurt your feet!  The last one has very wide ties that butt up snug against the rails.  These ties are beginning to soften and if they are wet, they are super slippery.  Proceed with caution!

So, today, when I approached the first set of tracks, there were some railroad employees doing track maintenance.  Unfortunately, they were putting down some more of those awful rocks.  I hurried past them before they put down the rocks where I would be forced to tiptoe around them.

It was my plan to turn around at the tracks with the soft ties.  Turning around there and heading back home would give me my 7 miles.

As I was getting close to my turn around spot, a pickup truck pulled up at the tracks and stopped.  I mean, it parked there!  This was odd.  I was still quite a ways off and figured that it would keep on going by the time I got there.  Nope.  It was still there.  Hmmm….

I could tell there were two guys sitting in the truck.  I was trying to decide what to do.  I really, really wanted to turn around there but me, being silly, didn’t want to turn around right by the truck and I didn’t want to cut my run short either!  I decided to just see what would happen.

Right when I got to the tracks, the two guys in the truck got out.  Great.  I couldn’t turn around there.  That was just too weird.  I’m kinda strange about things like that.  So, I decided to just keep on running to the end of that road (it dead ends onto private property).  Rats.

This would turn my 7 miler into a 10 miler and I really didn’t want to run that far today.  I had run 15 on Sat. and I have a Half Marathon on Thursday.  I don’t want to let my legs get too tired.  *sigh*

I ran all the way to the end of the road and turned around.  By the time I got back to the tracks, the truck was gone and I had run 7 miles.  I crossed the tracks and called MFH (My Favorite Husband).  He said he would be happy to pick me up.

I picked up the pace and got in one more mile before he met up with me (we really don’t live too far from where I was running this morning).  So, this morning’s run was 8 miles.  Tomorrow, I think I’ll just run a 5K and rest on Wednesday.