cc licensed flickr photo shared by thomas.merton

Despite my best intents, I’ve been taking more rides on the Excuse Train than I ought to, and my training schedule has been on a slide since early November. This week the train tickets were due to travel to Austin for meetings- I got a nice run in Thursday afternoon down on the river trail. I lost Saturday completely due to the flight back and drive home (got here after 6:00pm).

Today had me ready to ride The Train with a morning of cold sleety rain that looked like it would make a day of it, but around 2:30pm, the sky broke open to the sun and blue skies. I got on twitter a message from 8th grade teacher Chris Harbeck, who’s chimed in on my tweetplaints (complaining via twitter about the running conditions where he is, somewhere on those frozen tundra plains of Canada:

Frosticles. It was a cold day for a run. Do yo look like that in Strawberry @cogdog ? -30c or -40c with windchill

along with a link to this photo, that shamed me right off the couch in front of the fire:

Ouch, frozen eye brows! And here it was a measly 40 °F (4 °C).

I was not sure I’d get to make up the 10 mile run I missed Saturday, and was dreaming of blogging about reaching double digits. I planned a variation of one of my regular routes around the neighborhood and our Fossil Creek Road, but with extra side loops through some other neighborhoods- this way, if I ran out of steam, I would not be stuck 4 miles from home.

It was slow and steady (that is how we are supposed to go on these ones), and I ran out of steam around 7.5, and with the darkness coming called it a day (walked another mile home).

Not great, but better than riding the Excuse Train.

It was time to stop the train.