May 14-20, 2012

I keep saying I'll do better, and then I keep doing very little.  One of the pitfalls of being an English teacher close to the end of the school year.  I have a mountain of papers to grade, and therefore I cannot make it to the mountain as often as I'd like.

I did manage one trailrun in the Dishman Hills, but other than that, it was a lot of work and very little play during the week.

The weekend was much, much better.  I volunteered to lead a neighbor's church group up Antoine Peak on Saturday, and we had so much fun on this beautiful, sunny day!  I only got us a little lost once (I hope they forgive me--they are a church group after all).  I was a little lost because we started from the Lincoln Road side; I've never been to the top from that side of the mountain.  It was very pretty--I hate to admit it, but it was probably prettier than the Robbins Road side, at least on the lower section.  There were a bunch of yew trees along a creek on that side of the mountain; I don't think I've ever seen yews in Spokane county before.  Of course, the west side of Antoine has the largest juniper tree I have ever seen; I guess it proves that the entire conservation area is spectacular!

Sunday was my super intense gardening day.  I lost track of time again and forgot to save enough time to both run AND grade papers.  Papers won.

Weekly mileage = 3 miles running & 6 miles hiking.

May 7-13, 2012

This week wasn't much of an improvement over last week.  I stopped by my parents' house on Tuesday to get Blaze and run to the top of Antoine Peak (6 miles).  It was a great run, and then I was so sore I could barely walk the next day, so I skipped a Wednesday run.  On Thursday I did an easy loop in the Dishman Hills (3 miles).  Friday I left town for a quick camping trip, and then Saturday I got in another nice long hike while looking for morels (8 miles).  I didn't do as well this weekend; they are drying out and this is the last weekend for the morel hunt of 2012.  Sunday was devoted to gardening and trying to get my poor neglected house in order.

Running = 9 miles; hiking = 8 miles.

April 30 - May 6

The week was nearly a complete loss: One day of running after work, and it was just a boring neighborhood three mile loop.

Things started looking up for the weekend, however.  I returned to my favorite morel spot, convinced that this weekend would be the peak.  I was right!  It's hard to know my mileage for sure since a lot of it was walking up and down the mountainsides picking morels, but by the end of the weekend I estimate that I covered about twenty miles and came home with somewhere close to twenty pounds of morels!  Time to look up new recipes to try out!

On the way home I turned on the radio to a re-run NPR broadcast of an Adrienne Rich poetry reading where one of the poems was "What Kind of Times Are These."  The first lines of the first three stanzas are "There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill // I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled // I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods [...]."  It's such a cool poem in and of itself, and it seemed especially fitting today.

Weekly mileage = 3 miles running & 20 miles hiking