Aye, with early church beckoning on Palm Sunday, it was an off-the-books, earlier-than-usual Ritchie Run.

The Pax:

OBT (QIC)
Pomfret

The Thang:

With Your Humble Correspondent’s first 50-mile race just two weekends away, YHC wanted to get in a 20-miler that would simulate some of my race planning.  I set the alarm for 0400, hit the sack midway through the first half of OSU-Kansas and was on the road at 0431.  I had my Camelbak strapped over my shoulders, loaded with an energy/electrolyte drink and was on the same run 15/walk 3 pattern that I established on the Midnight Run.

The route took me through up 7th through Elizabeth, out Central Avenue and then out The Plaza and up 35th Street to the heart of NoDa, back into downtown on North Davidson Street, left on 7th to pick up the greenway at Kings Drive, across the greenway to the East Boulevard entrance to Freedom park.  I arrived right on schedule at 0600 and picked up Pomfret.  We went to the end of the greenway at Brandywine, up Brandywine to Selwyn, then down Colony until we met up with the SixShooters, turned around and ran with them for a while, did Roswell and the back side of the Booty Loop, then a spur up East to Dilworth Road East, back down to Freedom and back toward Elizabeth on the Greenway.  Pomfret dropped off at the Captain Jack Statue at Kings and 4th; I continued on and into Elizabeth, to the finish at Casa OBT.  Total mileage: 19.67.  Here’s the full Garmin report.

Spreadsheets from the Gloom:

_ It was a quiet Palm Sunday in the QC, just YHC and the taxicabs for much of the run.  A lone bicyclist (not of the Rulebook or other Tri-Guy variety) did shadow me for a while along The Plaza, but he was on the other side of the street and more focused on a meandering search for loose change and empty alumnum cans on the street.

_ T-claps to Pomfret for joining and putting up with my walk breaks, pace, etc.  As always, he was full of interesting thoughts and ideas, which made the latter miles speed by.

_ I was in such a zone in my pace and running that Pomfret suggested I rename the Sunday run the EaglesRun — as in “I’ve got a peaceful, easy feeling.”  That led to a lengthy conversation that revealed Pomfret has heretofore unplumbed depths of musical knowledge.  For example, did you know that the producer of all the key Eagles albums from the 70s, Bill Szymczyk, now lives right next to the Blue Ridge Parkway in Little Switzerland, NC?  Pomfret does.  Our talk about that “California sound” of the 70s (which I associate with the Eagles, the Doobie Brothers and, later and to a lesser extent, Bob Seger (whom Szymczyk also produced) and the other albums my Dad listened to in the late 1970s and early 1980s), led to this question for Sweeper Boy: The 70s California sound sound seemed to us to have clear ancestry in the Beach Boys mixed with the country-fried rock of the Allmans and others — but what happened to it after the early 80s?  Is there a modern-day descendant of that style, and what would you call it?  The only guys we could think of still active in that genre (unless you count reunion albums) would be Tom Petty, but he came more clearly from a Southern roots-rock line to begin with.  Thoughts, Sweep?

_ T-claps also to Chelms and Cougar, who led the workout that Pomfret and I attended at AG on Saturday.  We were both still feeling all those lunges in our glutes as we made our mileage this AM.

OBT