New personal best at Ogden River Parkway

Today, Kelly and I planned on doing a long run at the Ogden River Parkway. He's still training hard for the Ogden Marathon, while I've been slacking off with no running events in the near future. The Salt Lake Marathon likely isn't happening and I haven't been lucky enough to win an entry to the Ogden Half during the weekly 'Love for Locals' drawings.

I kind of felt like this after my run, until I discovered someone mistaked my water bottle for garbage and threw it away.

Anyway, I decided running with him would help me get my ass in gear and boy did it work. He went for a new personal-best 10 miles and I just wanted to see how far I could go. Kelly ran a half before, but an injury kept him from running the entire thing, so this was his new non-stop running best. The parkway is nice because it has markers every half-mile, although sometimes its hard to enjoy the scenery, because if you aren't watching your feet you are liable to step in dog shit. That stuff was everywhere on the trail.

Once I hit mile-marker two, I decided to turn around, just in case I got too far out and couldn't pull off the long run back. Once I got back to the start, I took a swig of my water bottle and went back out again. I was pretty tired, but once I hit the fifth mile I kind of got over the hump. I decided I had it in me to run back to mile-marker two and go for an 8-mile run (my previous high was 6.25 miles). Kelly and I crossed paths on his way back to the start, because he went all the way out to mile three before his first turnaround. We met again about a half-mile after I hit mile-marker two and I gutted it out to the finish.

However, once I returned, my bottle of water was gone. At first I thought it was stolen, but then I had a suspicion someone saw it and thought it was left there as 'litter' and threw it awy. Sure enough, when I looked in the trash can a few hundred yards up the trail, there it was. Blast! Kelly came trotting in with his dog Luigi about 15 minutes after, pulling off his 10-mile run. Man that guy is a strong runner. He makes it look pretty easy although he admitted he was pretty gassed, too. We refueled with some Quizno's after some light stretching and celebrated our milestones.

Total distance: 8 miles running