I’ve been mostly “treadmill-bound” for the last several weeks.  Part of it is due to schedule conflicts–it’s hard to run outside when your only options are in the middle of the night and before the sun is up in the morning, especially when you have kids to watch.  However, part of my treadmill is due to making excuses on why I couldn’t run outside.  Here they are:

1. It’s hot (took care of that one this summer)
2. It’s rainy out (I added this one after overcoming my aversion to hot weather)
3. My wife worked last night, so I can’t go run all over the place at 5:30 am [on a Saturday]
4. Midday runs in my neighborhood are congested and cross busy streets.
5. I can watch football most of the day if I run my long run on the treadmill.

I let my wife sleep in today, so I was going to run the treadmill downstairs for 3 1/2 hours for 22 miles.  I decided that, for some reason, that wouldn’t be very productive or enjoyable.

Second option, I decided to work out a 7-1/3 mile loop to run 3 times.  I figured that I’d just attempt to bail out of the run after the first loop.

Instead, 2 miles into the loop run, I decided to go catch up with my wife at Seneca Park for a Filipino gathering (starting in Fern Creek)… here’s the map for the first half:

Second half: I hung out a little while there before attempting to continue on to the Cherokee Park Scenic Loop [almost found it, too]–my wife was headed to Bellarmine for the Irish festival, so I planned to finish up there. Getting lost in the hills between Cherokee and Seneca was rough, as was the muscle pain from stopping my run for an extended period of time, but I managed to fight through it:

This run was actually slower than my last 20+ miler, but the average incline was about 1% greater, and the stop in the middle really killed my momentum.