Footwork

A small handful of excuses as to why this has laid dormant since November:

1. I'm not really a "blogger" type of person, and multiple attempts at it have all ended up with unceremonious lapses in activity and/or completely fading into Bolivian inactivity.

2. This is a bike-blog, and my bike activity has slowed down a ton over winter... though there were still a handful of awesome rides (a second-annual Ripplebrook trip with David through a few inches of snow, finally a first-ever use of my 239K route going the long way to Longview and back. Hard to write a bike blog about 30 Rock, beer, burritos, and A Song of Ice And Fire.

3. Lately, when I have been physically active, about half the time it's been in running (gasp!). Sarah wanted to get back into it and dove into the deep end by signing up for the 15K Shamrock Run which is now just two weeks away, and I figured, hey why not. We quickly realized that -- just like for long bike rides -- we couldn't actually run TOGETHER, since my pace was about two minutes per mile faster, but we're still training partners building up the same mileage, starting with basically nothing...

Well, not quite nothing. There's that whole pesky collegiate track/XC background of mine. I figured most/all of the relevant muscle memory and fitness would have long since disappeared since I quit that almost five years ago, but running has come back with relative ease -- after a few short runs to reacquaint myself with it, I settled back into 8:15/miles, when I was expecting to be closer to ten.

Anyway, it feels good, but doesn't really produce the same tales of travel and adventure as a 60/120/450-mile bike trip. Maybe I'll actually have more to say later in the year -- after this month's 15K, the next logical goal is a half-marathon, and the most appealing options are a pair of trail-based ones, in either Silver Falls or Forest Park.

For now, though, it's eight-ish miles at a time, starting and ending in Brooklyn.

(oh yeah, I got a Garmin!)