How's that for Sand in your Eye?

If you looked closely, you might have seen some sunshine this weekend. I did not look closely enough on Saturday, but yesterday it was sunny for a good part of the morning and then again in the early evening, just enough sun to make it hard to see the TV when I was watching a movie. The evening sun was directly preceded by a hail storm, and the morning sun was directly followed by rain. Ahh, Berkshire weather how do we love thee?

We don't. Actually, it's a love-hate relationship.

Berkshire weather, when you're nice to us, you're oh so nice. But when you get cranky you torment us for weeks on end.

As I mentioned, yesterday morning was full of sunshine. We had our Wedding Run for the Crazy Running Group woman, and it was a doozie. They claimed that it was 4 miles from the parking area to the summit of Greylock, but it took us over an hour and sure as shit felt closer to 6. On that type of terrain, it's really tough to judge distance since there's so much vertical, plus turning, weaving, river-hopping, downed-tree-ducking, and so on.

When we got to the top, the woman's fiancee was there along with another CRG member who couldn't run with us, along with breakfast and the basket of custom towels. She knew about the breakfast, but not the towels so it was a real surprise. Plus the names on the towels were hilarious when you saw them all together. Here are some notes from the breakfast...

First of all, there was lox to put on the bagels. I've never before had lox, so I had to try it. OH MY GOD! I knew there was a reason I hadn't tried it before, now I am going to require it on every bagel occasion.

Second of all, you shouldn't eat a big breakfast in the middle of a run. I thought we were done, but apparently we had to run most of the way back still - oops. Once I was full of orange juice and smoked salmon, my stomach didn't like all of the downhill bouncing and jumping around (I'll explain the jumping in a minute). All in all the run was something ridiculous like 3.5 hours. That includes the stop at the top and the drive partway down, but still, even if it was 2.5 hours that's a long freaking time.

At the tail end, we had another one of those cinematic scenes where we were running down a dirt road next to old farmhouses, weatherbeaten old barns and oldschool tractors. The sky had recently clouded up and it was beginning to drizzle. Despite the huge knots in my legs, it was a really cool experience. I may not like a lot of people in this area, the weather, or the lack of technical jobs, but you can't beat the landscape. Mmm MMM bitch.

So, back to the jumping around. The dirt roads we ran down on the way back from the summit had these long/wide strips of sand/dirt that I assume were left by a dump truck, to be smoothed at a later date. At the end of each strip was a pile that just begged to be jumped off/over. Very quickly, this turned into a game of doing tricks over the piles, landing in the soft sand behind it. On one occasion, another guy called a trick out for me right before takeoff; a two-footed grab. I left the ground, grabbed both feet and landed less than squarely on my feet. I rolled a little on my ping-pong bruises, and flung sand into my eye. As of 9:30 last night I was still picking grains of sand out of my left eye and I think there's one grain left.

After the run I went home, showered, ate some blueberry pancakes (breakfast #3, AKA Late Elevenses) and kicked back with my ChiRunning book. After a chapter or two (and maybe a nap), I decided to go to Target to pick up a few necessities - socks, shaving cream, cat litter, a movie, and some mozzarella cheese (for mini pizzas, yum). The trip was successful and uneventful.

After dinner I watched Cinderella Man, which was - as promised - a pretty good movie. I mean, I like boxing, I like Renee Zellwegger, and I like sitting and watching a movie. Score, score, score. I'll sum it up with this; I laughed, I cried, I drank some coffee. When the movie ended, I had just enough time to make strawberry/blackberry crisp before The Simpson's came on. Perfect timing for the ol' Coot Doggy Dogg! The Berry Medley Crisp was perfect with a scoop of Ben and Jerry's vanilla ice crea, damn I'm good.

Well, that's it for Sunday. I hit the hay around 9:30 for some good old fashioned beauty rest and the day was over. A good all-around day for the Cootster.

Over and out,
Old Coot

P.S. Miss "Maven", why is your blog password protected? It's on my required reading list so I need to read it.