The View

The sunshine came out with some pretty blue skies so I decided to grab my camera on my walk today and snap a couple of shots of the view I see on my bike trail. Looking down the street from my house, right at the end where the road turns and you can see that distant street light there's a sidewalk that cuts through to the trail.

As soon as you cross through that sidewalk you reach the trail that runs between the subdivisions. Looking north to the right the trail leads on for 2miles and passes the playground/park area at the front of our sub.

Looking the opposite direction facing south the trail continues for just over another mile, so we actually enter the trail right right at the 1.9 mile marker.

Which is perfect because I can begin timing my run after walking just a short distance to start at 2.0miles.

I'm not a cold weather, snowy winter scenery type of person...at ALL, but there's something about some of these massive, huge trees with all their branches exposed reaching high into the blue sky that's so beautiful.

The trail heading south winds and curves just slightly and then it begins to open up. So peaceful and secluded, no cars flying past.

And there's several small farms with tons of horses that the kids love to look at, especially EJ.

A little further down the trail, the subdivisions end and huge farm fields open up. I wish I had panned this area panoramically, but as fate would have it my camera batteries were dying & I wanted to make sure I could take a few more shots. You can also see how flat and straight the trail becomes here...perfect for running!

Not to mention, when you're facing the opposite direction coming back, or just looking east to the left there's an amazing view of the snow covered mountains. This picture seriously doesn't do it justice to see this in person.

Passing another farm there's a small road to cross before continuing on the trail. There's not much traffic on this road, so most of the time I don't have to bother with stopping (which really helps when I'm timing my run) and it's another reason I run on this leg of the trail because in the opposite direction just past the park there's another street that's VERY heavily traveled and I would always have to stop and wait for traffic...which of course would ruin my time.

Standing in about the same spot as the photo above, just looking the opposite direction where we just came from.

EJ was tired and couldn't keep up with my running, (which kind of made me feel good, esp. since she blew right past me when we started running) so she decided to stand here and wait for me to loop back. She had a great time because three of the horses came right over to the fence and she was able to feed them a bunch of hay that had fallen on this side.

Time to head back now.

It's totally amazing to me how incredibly different the scenery on this trail is in the winter vs. in the spring and summer when everything's in bloom! I can't wait to take some new photos of the trail then!

So I did much better on my run this time compared to my first try!

1st try 1.5 miles outside = 18:10min.
2nd try 1.5 miles outside = 17:19min.

I was planning to keep going and time myself at 3.1 miles today, but somehow I managed to turn off my watch timer and didn't realize that until I was at 2.5 miles.

At that point EJ had given up on running and was way behind me, so I doubled back and found her and decided to time myself in another 1.5miles.

3rd try 1.5 miles outside = 17:54min. (also today)

So I'm guessing my total 5k time would be around 36min. Something else that's VERY different outside right now that I hadn't considered before...WIND!!! Today was INCREDIBLY windy and the resistance while running made a huge difference. I can't wait until the weather warms up even more & the cold windy days are over.