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| Yellow dry grass at Scottsdale Soccer Complex |
I am in week 4 of London Marathon training. Long runs are getting longer. Today, I ran for an hour and 45 minutes for 12.5 miles.
I haven’t run the Scottsdale Soccer Complex in a long time. Today I decide to run circles around it. As I approached, I realized that the Barrett Jackson auto show was in progress and half the soccer complex has been converted into a parking lot. The lovely green grass was dry and yellow. In a couple of weeks, the Phoenix open golf tournament will come to town. The soccer fields are already in tragic shape right now, but about the get worse.
I parked my car in the northeastern quadrant of the complex and decide to run 25-minute loops. Each loop was about 3 miles. After each loop, I stopped for water and nutrition. It was a warm day with overcast skies. The backdrop of the dark McDowell mountains contrasted nicely against the bright yellow grass. There were a few other runners, walkers and dog-walkers out and about. Most had stayed away because of the auto show.
In the final and fourth loop, I decided to veer off-course to add the extra minutes required to complete the hour and forty-five minutes. I managed my heartrate mostly in the low to mid 140s and averaged a respectable 8:24 per mile.