20,000 visits

Today I had my 20,000th visitor to my runjoey blog. I originally started the blog in 2006 simply as a place to record my race stories to make it easy to share them friends and family that may be interested in reading of my little adventures in running. It really hasn't changed too much from that although I occasionally post on other things.

I know many people do a search for a report on races they are interested in running but sometimes it seems that others stumble upon it by accident. The funniest ones to me are the ones that are obviously looking for porn when searching for "dirty girls", thanks to my link for Dirty Girls Gaiters.( I will now be getting dozens more hits over the next few days since I mentioned it again).

I really appreciated the comments I receive from some people that they were inspired by one of my stories or races to go out and push themselves on to bigger things. And it is really cool to have people recognize me at races from them having read my blog. But most of the hits I think are due to a bunch of my regular readers and friends. Thanks Mom and Dad !

Well this past weekend I was suppose to be racing and have a report for you but Mother Nature had other plans. I headed down to Myrtle Beach to run the half-marathon with Mountain Girl, Ultra Angel, Marathon Princess and Mr Minimalist, also known as Lisa, Jenn, Karla and Frank. Frank was running for fun, Karla and Lisa were aiming for PRs' and I was going for a fast workout while Jenn was running the full and hoping for a Boston Qualifier.

Well, it snowed a little bit and the city decided to cancel the race at 10:30 pm Friday night but that didn't stop us from getting in a run. We headed out about 8:30 am from the Breakers Resort for our own Half Marathon on Ocean Blvd. It was about 32F, a little windy but felt great after we warmed up. Mark Dowd was with us for the first 9 miles and pushing the pace a little bit. The roads were clear except for an occasional slushy spot so running was not a problem. It was great to see hundreds of other runners out on the course too and many people were handing out water bottles from their cars and cheering us on. The police cruised by several times but never said anything to anyone about running in the streets.

After dropping Mark off at the Breakers we headed out the other direction for a couple of miles. We were enjoying the beautiful landscaped beachfront homes covered in the rare snow. Just before turning around we spotted Mike Walsh and he joined us for the last two miles. A great run but it would have been nice to race.

While eating lunch at the usual place, we found out they were handing out the medals for finishers over at the Ballpark so we stopped by to pick those up on the way home.

Thanks to all of you for reading and I hope to be a little more prolific in my writing this year.

more snow running

After work I was able to make my way over to Umstead Park this afternoon for another run in the snow. I was looking forward to getting into the park and having a peaceful run. I knew the roads would be treacherous today with cars getting out and about and the slush and ice getting more slippery.

The gate to the Reedy Creek entrance was closed so I parked on Old Reedy Creek Road. When I ran the half mile to the bridle trail I was a little surprised at how many others had already been out in the park this weekend. Lots of foot prints and bike tracks had made for a rough running surface in the snow. Once I got to the fountain footing was a little better as I begin to run in the tracks the Park Ranger's truck had made but I still had to be very careful, especially running downhill.

The forest was beautiful as I expected and it was a wonderful day to be out but it took a lot more than my normal effort to run and my pace was about a minute per mile slower than normal. I practically had the place to myself for the 10.4 miles I ran. I only saw a couple of people walking dogs and four other runners. That was a bit funny. I waved and said "good Afternoon" to the first two I saw. No response. Twenty yards behind them was a woman. I wave and say "hey". No response. The 4th runner was another woman another 20 yards back. Same result. Hmmmm, either these are a bunch of self-absorb snobs or I had forgotten my Ultraman Joey powers include invisibility.

I took some more pictures while I was out there and added them to the photo web album from this weekend. Here is the link again.