where heaven stopped and the earth began

  

so here is one of my favorite pictures so far. i don't super like the actual photo ..its a little too dark. but that stretch of trail back there on the lake jackson loop is literally glorious. the best is when you run out there right before the sun sets. not this run but a different one i learned that.  this is where my laziness actually paid off. i waited til the last minute of lighttime to run (like i do everyday that i don't have scheduled practice) and i was stressing about getting back to the trailhead most likely. i tend to imagine creepy creatures like this chasing me (okay that was more in my childhood years. but on a trail when its getting dark ones imagination can start to run wild. i don't actually feel like Prometheus and Bob are chasing me. i still run faster.)

Anyways the point is i was probably not thrilled to be out running and i was probably silently complaining to myself (anyone detect a pattern here? love/HATE right?) and i got to the back stretch pictured here. 

it was one of the prettiest things id ever seen. want to avoid describing it like some cheesy book but i thought i had stepped into heaven.  the sun was just setting and it was shedding this silver light all over. the grass was high then (about waist high besides the trail part) and the light hit the grass and split into hundreds of "rays" of sunshine. all this bright white. and then the shadows were..and the sky...and...literally it was beyond words. so i'm running and i'm just overwhelmed with this joy. cheesy i know. but i (checked to make sure no one was around) and just threw my arms up. (it sounds so goofy when i say it. but it was just the only reaction.) i had to stop (for a short time mind you i didn't want to be on the trail at night) but i HAD to stop. i stood there like a doofus just smiling at this awesome, glorious sunset. and i just said "thank you" and couldn't say much else.  i wish i had a picture of it. this sunset/picture is nice but it doesn't do it justice at all, but it's still a beautiful place to run. i only stopped for less than a minute and then kept running. i was on that stretch for a little while just turning and looking back at it like i would never see anything that contained that much beauty again. i will, one day. but i got a glimpse of it there. imagine if i had decided not to run that day.

 

and the repetition kills you..

hey people!
     sorry i've been super busy the last few days and wasn't in the mood for any blogging. but i have time today and inspiration. so the title of this is a song title. it doesn't like speak to me or anything, it just has to do with repetition. which is the focus of this post. of this post. see what i did there?


i bring it up because carney island is just tons of 1mile-1.4 mile loops. ive found a few smaller trailbies but they've started to get overgrown and there are a lot of roots and a lot of horseflies in the summer when i usually run at lake weir. so yeah. repetition. it makes for horrible long runs and lots of turkey sightings (those turkeys are a little bit scary too).

so repetition is a huge part of a runners life. right? you don't really think about it but it really does just come down to right left right left right left right left. same trails same runs. same people same conversations. i mean already i have a butt ton of pictures of the track so far. (fancy that, track season and all.) my mom quotes a teacher of hers that always said "repetition facilitates learning". oh true. i guess with muscle memory that makes sense (i don't exactly know how that works im just saying stuff) anyways. yeah with running, especially long distances its really all about consistency. and that means running every day pretty much, consistently. i say this like i  know something (like i said i'm just saying things). peat and repeat. cate and duplicate. run run run as fast as you can (tangent much). there wasn't really a point to this post i guess. and that whole repetition facilitates learning thing doesn't apply to everything. for instance i ran the krispy kreme challenge and i will definitely not be repeating that experience because i learned that the marginal utility of a donut to my stomach is greatly diminished on the 7th donut. but i suppose the repetition of donuts helped me learn that so maybe in a way it is true. my brain is fueled only by glaze at the moment so i'm gonna go take a sugar coma now. but seriously promise me you'll never do the krispy kreme challenge. cross your heart! cross it! it was an experience at least. i repeat. never do it! and that's kendall's story.

New year, not so new road.

here she is. bear trail. we call it that because my dad claims to have seen a bear on it once. i never have. but i call it bear trail still. its this long dirt road in ocklawaha, fl (the "town" where my family's lake house is. ) can't tell you how many miles i have done on this road but i can tell you that compared to other places this one has hosted the most miserable, sad runs of my "career". It's hard to get up in the morning on a beautiful day at the lake when other people are sleeping, sailing, tubing, whatever; and go running on a hot, boring, dusty dirt road. Luckily some people are blessed to have the greatest dad in the whole dang world, no wait some people aren't because I am. my dad would sacrifice his laketime every morning to wake me up (20 times if necessary) and drag me kicking and screaming to this road. then he'd drive in the car and listen to dave matthews band or a book on tape while driving just far enough where i could still see him. Actually on most days he would ride his bike next to me the whole way and listen to me gripe and cry about how i hated running and horseflies and bear trail and running and horseflies and horseflies blah blah (i complain a lot, we get it). He would distract me by talking to me about the team and running or he'd listen to me complain about team drama or we would just talk. he told me stories. about him running through the trails singing bachman-turner overdrive's "baby you ain't seen nothing yet" as he trained in college, about my brothers running on the same roads years before (my dad did the same thing for them, 10 years in a row in all). he would sympathize sometimes, tell me to buck up other days. always "you can go a little faster", and "easy for you to say!" sometimes i would scream at him about how i just wanted to stop. but usually he wouldn't let me. i ran every day of vacation and it was no thanks to myself. afterward we would go to CJs bakery on mericamp and buy two dozen of the best handmade donuts you ever had. Those were miserable runs, but good conversations, and good donuts. I love my dad. and i love bear trail, even though i hate it.

That was in high school. In college, we found a new trail that i don't mind running at alone most of the time. but sometimes i'll visit the old bear trail and reminisce. i wasn't running over the winter break AT-ALL and i was okay with it. back in the day (when i was an athlete) i used to never ever skip a run but over the break the tiny thread holding me to running broke. i think it might have been a good thing because i realized what a big part of me it is. even though i'm just okay and even though i still don't really identify myself as a runner (i look at those random people who run on campus and think "i wish did that, oh wait") I started to realize i didn't like NOT running as much as i thought i did. So i decided to start again full-throttle january 1st, what better time, right? So that's this picture. I was running with my brother zack whose new years resolution was to get abs again (run "errday" was a facet of that) we were running and it was a lot harder to do then i thought it was going to be. i did my classic thing where i think about how horrible the next 40ish minutes will be and psych myself out. so i distracted myself by thinking about my new years resolution to run every day and how i could help myself want to do it. and i thought about how much running has been a part of my life (something only its absence that couple of weeks really helped me appreciate) i thought about getting a rock from every run (for some reason i thought THAT would be a good idea) and then i thought maybe i might turn into a hoarder and so i thought id take a picture every run instead. (not going to lie i did also think about how people would think that was interesting, hey i'm being honest, you can respect that). so i went and got a camera and went back to bear trail later that day and took this picture. its right before the last turn 6 minutes before you get to the end of the run (i hate bear trail. this was my favorite part). so i got a fanny-pack from my aunt and started this silly project. I would take a picture of every run this year, it really has helped me get out there some days. and  I think it will be fun. some people just see roads or trails or woods or whatever. but I was thinking about how many times i have run on all these trails and how i can picture every step of bear trail, forest meadows, sunny hill, all these places. how much of my life these last five years has been spent doing this. how i've thought so many thoughts, said so many words, laughed so many times, on these roads. i know its hoakie but i love the idea of having these pictures up somewhere where i can look at them and appreciate the memories and the beauty. i know it sounds silly. but maybe you can understand. well that certainly was one long run-on sentence.

"That might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most."- Up