Hey, can you believe it I ran outside today and guess what I fell on my arse while running.

Teach me to run outside. 😉

Yeah, I decided that I wanted to see what kind shape the Augusta Rail Trail was in on a day where it was in the mid 20’s and the breeze was under 10 mph. Mostly to see whether it would be runnable for my long run Sunday.

When I started out I was hopefully optimistic that it might be clear all the way to Hallowell and maybe further. Alas once I got to the turn for the “Y” things went to shit pretty quickly.

Ice and more ice.

Of course me being me I kept going and ran very gingerly through the longer an longer iced out sections. Finally as I was getting ready to go into the dog leg right before the old oil storage facility, my arse found the ice.

That is that huge drop in pace on the Strava graph, just before the 1.5 mile mark.

Luckily nothing broke and the only thing bruised was my over-sized ego.

However, while I was sitting there figuring out that nothing was broke, I decided to get off the Rail Trail and stay to hell off it, until it thaws out a lot more. So no, I will not be running my long run on it this weekend.

Once I got going again, I thought about running up the big hill in Hallowell, but I figured that might be a bit too much for where I am in my training, so I decided to go out around the road to Vaughn Woods and loop back by the State Capitol area to avoid running on the rail trail again.

Actually I felt pretty good during the whole run and the hills while they got my attention didn’t seem to kill me like they did last summer. I guess that losing the 10 pounds is helping a little in that regard. Otherwise, I just focused on running comfortably and keeping a consistent pace – well for the most part anyways.