Found a New Running Route

The 15 miler on Saturday went as planned. I was little bit all over the place with my time, but mostly under 9min miles. Which my goal for this run. If I can keep this pace through the whole marathon, I will be happy!

I needed to get this run in early because I had a pretty busy day ahead of me. So I was up at 6am, had coffee and a Powerbar and out the door by 7. For those of you that do not know, I live in Webster, Ma. Webster borders Thompson, Ct. In all my time running, I have never run into CT. Just always stay in town or in the surrounding towns, just never in CT. Don't ask me why, just out of habit I guess. But when mapping out a 15 mile run I found a nice loop that a mile into my run it goes into CT for about 4 miles then comes back up into MA for a mile, then back into CT for a bit, then back into MA. (see the map below)

The run into CT is all country roads. Mostly flat for the first 3 miles, then it's rolling hill from there on. I run by farms, ponds, rivers, swamps and by beautiful homes. I almost stepped on a turtle that was on the road at one point. I saw frogs jumping into ponds as I ran by them. I even saw a place that had Emus running on their property! ..... What!?  Emus I said! Giant birds man!!

If I would have saw them at mile 14, I probably would have thought I was hallucinating!  Nope... very real.

Anyways... I think I found my new running route. The best part about it was that I probably saw 6 cars the whole run into CT. In Webster I'm always weary of cars as I run on busy roads all the time. All this time and it was only a little over a mile down the road.

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Today I ran 5 miles this morning. By 3pm I was edgy and looking for something to do. So I hopped on my bike and headed towards CT to check out some trails that I had noticed when I was running the day before. I basically jumped into the first entrance that I saw to see where it took me. 

As you can see on the map, the trail (the red line) was pretty much straight except that it had a lot of other trails that ventured out to the left and right. This being my first time on it, I stayed on the main trail just to see where it came out. At one point I had to pull my bike off to the side at let a parade of noisy 4 wheelers go by me. Mostly all kids. I swear they revved their motors louder as they went by me. The trail ended back out on the road but across the street the trail continued on. I decided to stick to the road and basically followed the same route I had run the day before. The hills were tougher on the bike in my opinion. :) I plan to run these trails next time and venture off into the lefts and rights. These would be great for early morning summer runs!

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That's it for me today. Hope everyone has a great week! Happy runnings!