A little humour - what happened to me on my lunchtime walk yesterday

In the early summer and late spring my training is quite a bit slower than other
times of the year. It's not because of the heat or the humidity. I train so slow that
all that does is speed up my rather slow heart rate. What slows me down are temptations that abound this time of year. BERRIES !!!!

I have been enjoying black raspberries, blackberries, wine berries and an occasional mulberry for a few months. After lunch i usually go for a 1 mile walk to keep my legs from stiffening up. Yesterday was nothing unusual. I went for my walk. My walk takes me a half mile out on a bike path and back. On a few portions of the trail, the trail is raised above the ground around it. On one of these raised sections i saw an area where people had beaten down the undergrowth to get to a blackberry patch. I looked at the patch and saw a few berries further away from the trail. I reached and got one. I saw another and i reached further. I saw another one even further away and i put my leg out behind me to balance myself to get it .....and i fell face first into the blackberry patch with my head much lower than my feet because of the embankment. I just laid there for a moment while i though of how to get loose. First i tried to turn on my back and managed it but still my feet were way higher than my head and i was tangled in the briars. I tried to sit up - i could but i could not GET up so i slowly tried to angle my feet downwards by turning in an arc. Every effort only gained me a miniscule result because of the awkward position i was in and because of
the briars. It reminded me of falling down on snowshoes with a heavy pack in deep soft snow. After struggling a while - not sure how long a woman peered over
the embankment and said "do you need some help". I said yes and thanked her profusely. It still was not that easy to get out of the briar patch but she managed to help me out. When i was out i started walking with her. She was walking at a
very respectable pace - probably around 14:00/mile. She told me that she saw something off the embankment and went back to look at it and found me. She must have passed the sad pile of cloth the first time.

When i got out i was covered with smashed blackberries and i had thorns all over.

It was hilarious, though i will remember this incident and be more careful picking berries. If it had not been for that woman i might have had to call my partner to come and save me ;-)

---- Marina

Nice little run

Today my partner and i run the Women's distance Festival 5K in Reston. It was a lovely WELL ORGANIZED run with markings and course marshals to point the way.

When Laura runs a race with me i am pretty much always the side show no matter how fast i go. She does 5k's on crutches or in this case, trekking poles.
Today one of the runners told her that they started running because they were inspired seeing her do races even though she is disabled.

My run was good. Despite having a hurt left foot i managed to run 21:30 for 7th place overall. I was told after finishing that i was 6th place. Looking at the results it seems it skips from 5th place to 7th place. Fine by me ;-)

I won a nice lava lamp for winning the 45-49 age group.

Later in the day i crept 20.5 miles walking 3 miles of it in the hope of working
out the kinks in my legs. It turns out that it really hurts to 6:54/mile for 3.1
miles when you mostly train at 10-11 minutes/mile ....or slower. Anyway - all part of what it is to run distance ;-)

---- Marina