Day 3,964 —Tuesday all Day (this is a typical joke that teachers make)—

 

I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go, but headed the same way I went yesterday and decided I would try to make it back to the same pond. I decided it might be fun to find the pond from the new subdivision and then cut from there to the cemetery back to my house.

         I quickly realized that there were so many more ponds than I thought. I counted at least three, and I don’t think I found the one from yesterday. When I got to one that looked promising, I tried to run around and had to jump a fence. It was so muddy on the other side. The kind of mud that I thought would consume my shoes and I would end up running home in my socks or barefoot. A few trucks were driving around, which seemed odd to me that anyone else was up at 5:30, but they probably thought the same thing about me.

I headed from the pond to the woods and saw some yellow eyes and wondered if maybe a coyote was around. I did hear some howling after I had found my way through the woods and across the stream that runs between the woods and the cemetery.

 

Part of me thought how needlessly risky my behavior was as I jumped from one stone to the other to prevent my feet from getting wet, but then again this is a pretty normal occurrence in a trail ultra, and there is no time like the present to do some training. Maybe tomorrow, I will feel good enough to run with my weighted vest.