Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks, everyone for the encouraging comments and advice after my last post. My legs have been coming back and I had a really good 9 miler with some speed work this week that has me feeling better. I may still readjust my January goals, but am not really thinking about that too much at this point.

This morning Boyfriend and I got up to run the Turkey Trail Trot in Golden Gate Park. I figured we'd run to the race and back from home to add on some extra distance. The race itself was 5 miles and though I haven't downloaded the Garmin data, we probably ran 8.25 miles total. We kept joking that we had "Pulled a Dean" (of Dean Karnazes fame, an ultrarunner who often runs a hundred miles to the start of the race or sometimes runs a hundred miles home from the finish -- or both). Granted our "Dean" was only an extra 1.6 miles both ways, but whatever.

I volunteered at this race a couple of years ago and this was the first time I was running. The majority of the race is on trails or grass which was really challenging for me. I was really afraid I would twist an ankle. I kept giving mad props to cross-country runners who clearly have more mettle than I do. We stopped to get photo-ops with the Turkey both during and after the race.

The Turkey

The Bay Area is in a bit of a "cold snap" which is a real treat for this former East coast runner. There was even frost on the grass this morning!

Bad photo, but you can see the frost on the grass.

We were taking things really easy what with our "Dean," the terrain, and my having a 16 mile run tomorrow. Boyfriend kept gobbling at other runners and it was a lot of fun.

The best part of this race is the shirts. Every year they come up with a new graphic and word.

I had wanted to knit one of these snazzy hats for the race:

Image pulled from the awesome knit/crochet site, Ravelry

But I didn't have quite the right color yarn. I had some dark brown yarn and thought maybe I'd just make the legs and pin them onto my running hat. But people thought it sort of defeated the effect and would make it hard to tell what I was trying to do. So I scrapped that idea. Maybe next year. There were a few people with cool Turkey hats at the race:

A hand knit one would have been cooler!

So in the end I gave Mario the one leg I had knit to use as a prop to wish all of you a very Happy Thanksgiving!! I'm so grateful for all of you that I've either met through this blog or feel like we've already met. I hope you're all having a great holiday. The Stove Top stuffing just hit the stove so I am pretty happy over here!

You do know I'm vegan, right?