Part I Jun and I hit up a nice run around the Red Butte Gardens. He thought it was about 4 miles, but then a little into the run said "oh yeah, when I did this before we started closer, so it will be more than 4." Ended up being just shy of 6 (5.93). Totally fine by me. Beautiful run with some good uphill (1200 total), though a little muddy in some spots which made it interesting at times, particularly on the downhills - there were a few times I thought I might slide right off the side of the trail. As we were on the last mile or so we could see a storm rolling in, the wind was picking up and raindrops were making an appearance. We ran down the last stretch pretty quickly, and met Scott in the parking lot. Since the storm looked like it was moving pretty fast, we sat in Craigs car for about 5 minutes until it did. During which time he mentions that he thinks that's the first time he's ever run that loop without walking at all - he likes to mess with me like that. I told him I think my ignorance is sometimes a good thing in those cases. 5.93 miles, 55:32, 9:22 average, 1200 ft of elevation gain
Part II Once the storm had quickly passed, we suited up for the Mt Wire run. I threw on an extra long sleeve, thinking that it might be a 'little chilly' on top, but I left the gloves in the car since I hadn't felt like I needed them on the previous run. Bad idea. We ran up the first hill at a decent pace, especially considering we'd just run 6, then got to the hiking part. I believe Jun referred to this as "the suck". It was a rocky steep climb up to the top. Once we started heading up the ridge towards the top, the wind became horrendous. It seemed to get colder and stronger as we climbed, and several times it would push you nearly off the trail, and sometimes nearly knocked you over. I luckily had my headband on, which I pulled over my ears, and Jun, who was in front of me was covering his left ear with his had. I could tell he wished he brought his gloves too. There's these two big screen things near the top of the peak, and I'm glad that Jun had told me that they were about 100 yards from the top, otherwise I would have thought that they WERE the top, and been terribly dismayed when I saw that final stretch. We made pretty good time, but the wind was strong and my face was frozen, so it was no surprise that when we hit the top, Jun made an immediate left hand turn down the backside trail. Scott was standing there wondering what was going on, so I gave him a high five and said we were going this way. Scott headed back down the front. Once we started heading down my calve started locking up on me, and I could tell that Craigs were too. We stopped to stretch for a minute, and then jogging seemed to help loosen it up. My knee was giving me a little trouble, some residue from Fridays hike, but once I "found my form" the pain pretty much disappeared. This had some steep, rocky downhill, but after that brutal climb to the top, it was fun to just let your legs go - the only thing you had to worry about was where to put your feet. When we rounded the bend we could see Scott way up ahead from coming down the front side. We kept a decent pace (at least I thought so) up to the end. Scott was nice enough to hang around and say bye, I'm sure he also wanted to know what our time was too. Good'n'tired set of runs!!
5.23 miles, 1:16:58, 14:27 average, 2250 elevation gain
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