I got out of the house at about 6:20am weighing 146.0 lbs
and with a resting heart rate of 45 bpm. Mission Blvd was
packed and I found parking near Subway. 6:38am kicked off
my solo run.
It was cool and cloudy, a typical summer morning in the valley,
and shortly it became misty on the trail. The higher I went,
the denser the fog. After the last oak, my eye glasses were
covered with water and useless. Visibility was about 10 yards
and I ran steadily toward the foot of the summit.
I broke out of the mist halfway to the peak. The sun was
shining brightly in the majestic blue sky and white clouds
floated under me stretching as far as the eye could see. The
ascent took one hour and I stayed for seven min on the
summit where I bumped into a colleague. Each offerred food.
His Nature Valley Oats bar looked healthy. But I told him I
sweated all morning so that I could have a kitkat.
The descent on the Horse Heaven Trail was treacherous and
downright risky in the dense fog without glasses. I almost lost
control a couple of times. Thank God I safely reached the
Stanford Ave trailhead in 33 min. My feet felt good. After a
brief stop for water, I ran two miles along Mission Blvd to my
car and finished loop number one.
I dropped off the jacket at the car and started the second
ascent. By this time, I felt a little rusty. My glutes were
strong, however, and climbing up was again no problem.
After refreshments at the summit, I decided to find out how
long it would take me down on the Mission Peak Trail. That
trail usually had the most traffic and was recently smoothed
out and paved with gravel. To tell the truth, I prefer rugged
terrains such as the summit or the less popular Horse
Heaven. Well-maintained trails took away precious challenges
which were getting rare these days.
You see it everywhere. Yesterday, I chatted with a neighbor
(in his 60s) as I was about to hand-clean my car. He was
wearing some heavy-duty waist-wrap to "protect" his joints.
He expressed great admiration for my friend L who outran his
19-year-old son in the recent Zion 100-miler. And yet I never
saw him hand-cleaning his car or mowing his
great-looking lawn. Those jobs were made easy by the
drive-through car-wash and out-sourced to Mexican labor.
To me, these petty chores were the essential of life and it is
them that protect our joints and muscles from decay and
atrophy due to disuse. Do people realize how good a mobility
exercise kneeling down and hand-scrubbing hardwood
floors provides when they smuggly hand the job over to
iRobots? Or how good a grip and whole-body exercise it is
to hand-wash and squeeze a pair of pants?
My feet felt battered downhill. Again, I kept the strides
small, controlled my gait, and safely arrived at the trailhead.
(It took again about 33 min.) I rinsed my feet with cold
water and went on for the last two miles. It was painful
and reminded me of the last quarter of my marathon four
years ago. But my feet were in much better shape now.
After all, I just came through over 4500 feet of elevation, gain and loss.
OK. After six 12oz-bottles of water and three 42g kitkat,
I finished this morning's 18.5-mile run in 4 hrs 20min.
I did four rounds of Surya Namaskar besides my car, visited the
farmer's market on my way home, cooked a salty, fatty, and
spicy Mapo Tofu and had a great meal. My weight after two
bananas 143.4 lbs.
