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February 4, 2006
Over hill and dale in Winchester
I haven't done one of my long Mystic Lakes/Winchester loops in several weeks now. Today I was joined by a running partner who is actually a native of that area, so she showed me a couple of big hills and several ways to extend the loop that I didn't know about. Luckily today's run wasn't super-long (I actually wanted to do about 18 but I think it was more like 17.) The weather was not to my liking, because it was actually muggy (it's February! Hello!) and of course there were tons of fair weather runners out. As my running partner Alyssa pointed out, if we had run on the Marathon course today, there would have been even more (runner) traffic. True enough.
We decided to do this series of hills (probably almost a mile in distance) pretty early on in the run, which was good and bad. I still felt pretty good at that point, but my legs tightened up after the downhills that followed the uphills. I find that lately it's my hamstrings that get sore on hilly long runs. It wasn't too bad, but I enjoyed the run incrementally less because of it (does that make sense?) I've done most parts of today's route before but we added a little bit in Woburn/Stoneham which ended up coming by a pond that I believe is Spot Pond. It was pretty. In addition to the pond, the other notable site was a huge dead raccoon near one of the Mystic Lakes. I am not a big fan of raccoons (haven't been since one had babies in our chimney on the morning of my bat mitzvah) and it totally freaked me out.
When I got back from running, I quickly got ready and went over to the track at Tufts to watch MIT compete. All of MIT's meets this winter have been away so far, so this was my first chance to go to one. It was a long, but fun, day. The highlight was the 5K. Almost all of the girls in the race were shooting for the All-New Englands qualifying standard of 19:36. We had 5 MIT ladies and one ran a HUGE PR, coming in second, and all the others except one (who missed by a second!) qualified. It was a great effort by all of them. I know they've been working hard so it was nice to see their hard work pay off!
I'm staying in tonight to catch up on work and stuff since I was gone all day. I'm going to end this entry here because something is wrong with my keyboard and it's really hard to type!
Posted by becky at February 4, 2006 8:21 PM