9 Mile Run – with a Turkey!
As I was out at my mother’s place last night, I decided to check out MapMyRun.com to choose a local route to run. I’d traditionally used Gmaps Pedometer for such tasks, but it hadn’t been cooperating with my browser lately & I’d heard several folks mention MapMyRun.com. I planned for what I thought was about 8 miles, but ended up doing 9 miles in 72 minutes.
The math’s pretty easy on this one – it’s an average of 8 minutes a mile! This is quite a fast pace for me, especially over such a distance. (I’d been averaging ~8:15 over 7 miles the last couple weeks.) Since I threw out my cell phone headphones at the Corporate Challenge, l fired up what I thought was a dead iPod shuffle, formatted it a couple times, starred at it intimidatingly, loaded it with Cake tracks & got it going again – the Cake tracks were great for running to.
But without a doubt, the best part of the run was the turkey (a jake) that ran in front of me at mile 3.9 while running out the entrance to Evangola State Park!! It’s not uncommon to see deer or turkey in the park, but I thought I was seeing things at first – initially he looked like a road runner shooting across the entrance & one typically doesn’t see turkeys out in the open at 7PM or in such warm weather. I suspect the group of frisbee golfers I saw shortly thereafter spooked him across the road.