Saturday, December 24, 2005

Christmas Eve with the Cruisers

Can I just say that this was an absolutely beautiful morning for a run. Temps in the low 60's, sun shining, clear blue sky, just a wonderful southern California winter day.

I met the Cruisers again in Yorba Linda for another run along the horse trails. This time we met at Travis Ranch Youth Park, on the other side of town from where we met a few weeks ago. This run was dubbed "Rochelle's Run" since the first time they ran this route it was Rochelle's day to host the run. Makes sense, huh?

This week Jesse showed up. He is way faster than any of us, but a lot of fun to run with. Teresa's husband, George, joined us too. George and I started out together but stayed within earshot of the others. Neither of us had run this route before. Jesse joined us at about 1 mile. A couple of miles into the run we came to East Lake. I was surprised to find out that there is an actual lake in the middle of Yorba Linda. There is a shopping center nearby called Eastlake Village but I never imagined there was a real lake. Half way around the lake Jesse, George and I waited for some of the others to catch up. At some point we got too far ahead so we had to figure out our own route. We took a surface street back to the park. It seemed like a reasonable run. We were on the road for 80 minutes so I figured we had run about 8 miles.

We waited and waited for the others. George and I even discussed back tracking in the cars to see if something had happened. Eventually they all showed up from the trail that we had started on. That's when we realized that we had missed the turnoff back onto the trails. I just used gmap-pedometer and got 7.6 miles for the route we took. The others had run just shy of 9 miles.
The best part of all is that I got to drive home with the top down on the Christmas Eve! Woohoo, you gotta love it.

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