Almaden Quicksilver County Park

The workouts I look forward to the most are the trail runs. You can cover a lot of ground when you're running, which means you get to see a lot more stuff than if you were hiking. The constantly changing terrain requires you to be mentally alert, preventing boredom, but you generally don't have to be so engaged that you can't enjoy the scenery.

Jen and I went to Almaden Quicksilver County Park yesterday to get a few miles in. It was great! The weather was warm but not hot, so I put on a long-sleeved thermal shirt to get a little heat training in. Jen took off up Senador Mine Road, and I hopped on New Almaden Trail. Eventually I met up with Mine Hill Road and got some good climbing in. I made it up the steep face of Mine Hill and then turned around to meet up with Jen. The views of the Guadalupe Reservoir, Mt Umunhum, and San Jose were amazing.

I took the route back down that Jen had taken up, hoping to catch her before the end, but then I was surprised by a nasty little hill after Guadalupe Road bottoms out. My climbing legs were burned out so I just had to plod slowly through it. By the time I made it back Jen was drinking cool water from a Nalgene and playing video games on her iPhone.

This run reminded me a lot of what happened at the end of the Mt. Diablo 25K a few weeks ago. There are a few short uphills in the second half of that race, and I had to walk all but the smallest of them. I don't know if it's the sustained downhill that kills me, or if it is just that I'm really out of uphill gas. In any case there is a pattern here that I'm going to need to learn to break if I want to survive Skyline.

I was excited to post some great pictures that I took in the park, but I learned my camera phone (an old Motorola Razr) has the annoying feature that if you don't explicitly press the 'save' button, it assumes that you meant to delete it. The frustrating thing is that those images still exist in the thumbnail view in my phone, but if I view them or send them in a pic message they just show up as gray. Grr! If anyone knows how to get those pictures out please let me know. Anyway, here is the only one that survived, Jen getting ready to tear up some dirt. Also, Bay Area Hiker has some good photos of the park here.