Thompson Creek.

I began the day with a long conversation with someone from high school. I spent most of the day talking to her and it helped me come to terms with many of the problems I thought I had. I began to realize that even if I didn't talk to most people from here I was okay.

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When I am home I tend to drive to places to do my runs. For one Montclair is not nice to run in at all. It's a boring city with just a bunch of residential areas. Nothing nature-esque at all. One of the places I found that was nice to run at was the Thompson Creek trail in Claremont. A nice gradual downhill 2 mile trail that I used as a starting point to many of my longer runs. On the left you see nicer residential areas and on the right you see the mountains. A very enjoyable run to do especially in the late afternoon.

Last summer this was one of the runs that really brought me out of the slump that I was stuck in because of injury. I had one of my best runs on this trail and I was pretty excited to try it again.

I began at a pretty brisk pace as the wind began blowing pretty hard toward me. It was nice, even though I knew it was making me work harder. I remembered one line from a previous post saying that I passed the 2k marker at 8 flat. As I hit a split on my stopwatch it read "7:58", could I really be going this fast without even really feeling it? As the 2 mile marker began to come closer and closer I decided to make a last minute change and kept going. I passed through 2 miles at 12:35 and kept going for 8 minutes more just to give my mileage some room for error. I began to climb the big hill that came soon after the trail and was still feeling pretty good.

As I turned I remembered the one thing about this trail that I hated. The last two miles were uphill. I have to say those last 2 miles were complete hell. I pretty much just wanted to get them done and when I clicked my stopwatch to get my final split I was happy to say that I was done with running for the day.

For the day. Tomorrow continues my road toward hopefully the best running season of my life.