Wonderful Weekend

Manon and I went to Lynchburg to visit Randy, Kristin and the kids. We had a great visit, Randy and I got to run on Liberty Mountain Saturday evening. Then we had a guy get saved at church Sunday morning. After church me and Mark got to run. It had been a while since we had been able to run together. Sunday night after church we had Friends and family to the house for a bonfire. Then to cap off a GREAT weekend I got to run with my daughter Johnna. She is a few weeks into a couch to 5K program. Her 1st 5K will be July 2. I am so proud of her. She has been through a lot in the last year or so.

WOW !!! Thank God I Can Run

All day today, I thought I would come home, get the grass mowed, eat supper and then go for a 6 mile run. Well I did get the grass mowed, then I had about a half hour before supper would be ready, so I decided to go up to Mom and Dads to unload a set of RV steps that I cut off of a customers camper the other day. Dad came out to help and I told him to be very careful, because these steps was very sharp and awkward to handle. Shore enough I managed to stick a piece of metal about an inch into my hand. When I am stupid enough to actually damage myself all the way to the meat, it makes me a little queasy. I sat down for a few minutes then got up and finished what I was doing. All in a days work for me. The older I get the more accident prone I seem to get.
I got home and ate, but really didn't fill very good. But I really wanted to go run, so just before dark I said I was going to quit being such a sissy and go run.
I am sooooo glad I did. I had such a good run. It was like I was being carried by an angel. It was dark, but I never turned my flashlight on. I just enjoyed the dark and thanked God for allowing me to run.

Open Season

A couple of weeks ago we planted our sweet corn. It had all come up, and was looking beautiful, till yesterday. The dern crows pulled up every singe corn shoot and ate the seed kernel off the bottom of the corn plant. 7 rows of corn gone.
It is now crow season at my house. I am going to go "dirty Harry" on them.

Dirty Dog 15K

This was the biggest test thus far for the VFFs. This was a pretty rough race, a lot of mud and rocks. Rocks up hill are no problem. The downhills are a little slower, because it is really hard for me to run on my forefoot going downhill. As you can see in the pic, I made a modification to the shoes. I had hoped the strings would keep my pinky toes in the toe pockets where they belong. It worked great till about the half way. There was a pretty long uphill. I had problems with both feet, with toes coming out. When I got to the top I fixed the left foot and it stayed, but the right one never cooperated after that.

The Day Before

Its Friday, the day before The Dirty Dog 15K Race. This will be my longest race since January. It has been a long way back from this last injury (hopefully my last injury). I will try to remember the camera so I can get some pics. More later.....

Bluestone Trail

As most of you know, I have been running in my VFFs shoes for a while now. I have been easing into them. I started very slowly, the way you are supposed to start something new. It is working out great. I have been running in them exclusive now for several weeks. On trails too. I love the forefoot running stile. I believe it will allow me to continue to run for a long time.
I finally got to run on a tougher trail today. This is by no means a technical trail, but it has more real world stuff than the Fayetteville trails that I have been running. Mud, tall grass and weeds, water. Today was the most trouble that I have had with the Vibrams. The model that I have, the Treks which are made from kangaroo leather. Apparently kangaroos must expand a lot when they get wet, because those shoes got huge when they get wet. I purposely walked slowly through a creek, because I wanted to see what would happen when they got wet. After they got wet, they would not stay on properly. My toes kept coming out of the toe pockets and the shoes would slide around on my feet.
The real problem is that now I can't run in regular shoes. When I run in regular shoes, they hurt the top of my feet and my right ankle hurts also. I have been thinking about getting a more minimalist type of shoe for trail running and just wear the Vibrams on the road and the more tame trails.
I wish that I had my camera today, because there was this really cool thing that kept happening today. The trail is getting really over grown with grass and weeds and wild flowers. I kept getting grass and little flowers and stuff stuck between my toes. It looked cool running with flowers between my toes.