Runnin' With ZZ Top

"New (shorts), new shoes, and I don't know where I am going to..."

You remember that song by the bearded boys back in the 80's? That pretty much summed up my long run yesterday.  I decided to run something new yesterday, in a new pair of running shorts and new trail shoes.   I consulted my trail running book, picked a new trail to run, and I was off. 

Things didn't start very well for me.  Upon turning on my gps enabled running watch at the trail head, I was warned that the battery was low.  Frustrating, "but really", I thought, "how low could it be?" I had just charged it days earlier.  Turns out, it could be, and was, very low.  It was so low in fact, that  it couldn't find any satellites and died within the first 1/4 mile of my run.  "Well screw it", I thought.  I tried to focus on the relaxing aspect of not being tethered to an electronic device telling me all about how slow I was running, how my heart rate was sky rocketing, and how the incline was killing me.  I put a positive spin on it, and kept on running.

The trail, yeah, let's get into that a little... it was kind of brutal.  It let me warm up for like 1/2 a mile, (I guess) and then it had a pretty steep grade going up hill.  It had dirt steps, for God's sake!  I had written some notes down on  piece of paper, telling me where to turn at which mile, landmarks at mile whatever, things like that.  Well, when your gps is down, you've got no idea how far you're going.  Hell, I didn't even have any idea of how LONG I had been running.  All this is to say, the inevitable came to be:  I got lost.  Now lost makes it sound like I was stumbling around babbling like an idiot, scratching my head and saying "oh shit, now where do I go?"  It wasn't quite like that.  It was more like I saw a trail thought it looked right, and went that way.  About an hour (maybe) later, I came to a trail hub where I did know where I was. That was good.  I continued on my way fighting the wind every step of the way.  All in all, that run really kicked my ass.  I'm guessing I ran somewhere around 11-14 miles.  It was a beautiful run, and I'll be certain to do it again in the future.