Monday, April 1, 2013

The Second Running Box Enjoys Its Only Birthday

About two and a half years ago, I decided I was going to try to run down every street in a sizable swath of the East Side here in the City of Roses. To my surprise, I completed that project, and it only took about a year and a half. Then, for about a month, I kept being all, like, "where should I run today?" So, in a colossal failure of imagination, I marked off a different sizable swath of the East Side, and started again.

Today is the first birthday of the second "box." It is coming along quite nicely.



Purple represents streets first run last April, May, and June; Blue was the summer months; Green was October, November, and December; and the yellow represents the last three months. I've got orange and red left in the spectrum, but I don't think I'm going to need them both. I think I'll be able to polish this sucker off in May, to tell the truth; and that's good, because as much as it has been a great way to explore the town, the whole process of plotting routes and doing the mapping afterwards is starting to wear thin after two and a half years.

I'll admit that I'm a little concerned that I'll go back to being all, like, "where should I run today?" when the box is all filled in. But then maybe I can develop a handful of routes I enjoy at various distances, like a norm. We'll have to see.

But what of the Avatar?

My travelling Avatar has been covering a lot of ground in western Oregon. After leaving the C of R last October 27, he's been to Willamette Valley towns like Salem, Albany, Eugene, and Corvallis. After being laid up for a few weeks, like myself, with bronchitis, he crossed over the Coast Range, reached the beach at Pacific City, Oregon, and started back north and east towards, first, home, and then onward to the East Coast. Yesterday, he crossed into Washington County -- his tenth county -- and began his descent into the Portland metro area.   He's logged about 375 total miles.

March was a great month for running, by the way.  I stayed healthy, I started sneaking in some after-work runs with the return of Daylight Savings Time, and -- most importantly -- the calendar lined up five full weekends within the month.  All those things factored together let me run 95.92 miles, my second-best month of all time.  It's only the third time I've broken through the 90-mile barrier. Are my legs sore?  Yes.  But that's OK.  After you reach a certain point with long-distance running, it feels good to have sore legs.  It's kind of a weird hobby.

2 comments:

GT said...

Congratulations, that's impressive! But stay out of that nasty SW side! The SE has Reed and the professionals and the hippies. The NW has Powell's. The NE has museums and parks and Hollywoodland. But nothing good has ever come out of SW Portland. It's all hobos and businessmen and hobos on bicycles.

Michael5000 said...

Well, my mother and father came out of SW Portland. I guess we can lump them in the "hobos on bicycles" category. They'll probably like that.