South and North

Ran outside today. I haven't been running much this past week, so I guess I was feeling all energized today after riding the bike for a few miles. I ran a 5K in the desert by my house. Wow, the heat just beat me down. Some might say, well that's pretty obvious, maybe even stupid. However, the oven heat does a really good job of removing all other distractions from your mind. I'm not thinking, does my leg feel tweaky? Is my quad or hamstring tight? All I'm thinking is, holy mofo it's hot as booooop out here. Drink, run, drink, walk, drink! It kinda forces your mental state to focus on the simple concept of running economy and not think about what boxes I need to go through before our move.

I've told people I live in north Las Vegas, but this picture will give an idea of how north I live. The red arrow is where my house is. The landing strip looking thing to the left, is a huge gun range. The strip is waayyyyy to the right not in the picture.




Earlier in the week I decided to test out the trekking poles Liz bought from REI. Up to the south loop I went. I hadn't looked out the window in a while and as I was driving this is what I saw. I thought, that doesn't look too good, but figured I'd go check it out anyway. Turned out to be not bad at all.



The poles were pretty cool. They were awesome on snowy areas. Running downhill which I couldn't resist for just a little bit, is kinda tricky. It will take more practice. They definitely assist going uphill of course. It's interesting getting more of an upper body workout with the poles. I'm not sold on them yet. I'll test them out more next week hopefully.

Here's a pic from the south loop trail just about 1.5 miles up. You can see a cave in the rock wall on the middle left side. The next pic is directly looking in it. Spooookie! Then finally a look back down. After about 2 miles, I decided to turn around to take it easy. Also the weather was looking rougher. Funny thing though, I found out I still had cell signal here. Who wants a call?