Flashback Run at Bradley Palmer State Park

On Saturday night, D and I headed to my parent's house to "celebrate" Easter on Sunday. We didn't really celebrate, but my grandparents and uncle came over for brunch. I made omelets, and they were fabulous. No really, I'm the man when it comes to omelets. My dad made pancakes. They were really good, too. Eventually, the morning rolled along into the afternoon. We ate pie...chocolate banana cream pie, to be exact. So as you can see, our training regimen is all about nutrition.

Finally, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, we motivated to go for a run. They don't live far from Bradley Palmer State Park, and we had printed out the trail map for just such an occasion. The cool part about this for me was that in high school my home cross country course was at Bradley Palmer. I hadn't run there since high school, so I was pretty excited.

On the way to the park, we passed by a sign for Mass. Audubon Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary, which is where I used to cross country ski with my family as a little kid. I also attended a number of summer camps there. That would be nerdy, science, ecology, outdoor camps. The funny part about that place is that D and her family used to go there when she was young because she lived right around the corner. So, yup, a couple seconds after we saw the sign for the Wildlife Sanctuary she said, "Hey, there's Willowdale!" She lived there until she was 9.

So with all this good karma, we headed out on our run. About 30 seconds into the run we came to a puddle. It was deep. About 33 seconds into the run our feet were wet. Of course, we were pretty psyched to be on actual trails...not trails covered with snow. We were on an actual trail run. Overall, we probably had about 65% dry ground, 25% mud, 5% water and 5% snow. It was great. We also incorporated my old cross country course into the run, which was a lot of fun for me. While I didn't quite remember all of it, we had the map, which was enough to jog my memory.

We twisted and turned and managed about 8 miles. We finished caked in mud. Good stuff. And good flashbacks.