A Breath of Fresh Trail

 These are from Friday's run.  Brian and I managed two runs together over the weekend. Well, together in that we started and finished at the same place, but not together, together. He has specific distances he's needing to hit for his training, and I want him to be able to do them at his own pace, so we head in opposite directions. 

 Above, he's heading towards Buckeye Loop near Burma and the ranch, and below, I'm heading down Sunset. I did the Brazen 10k loop in reverse.

 Coming up the hill by the froggy pond (Little Pine ) that the 10k normally goes down, I stopped to look behind me and saw this....these beautiful oak trees back lit by the sun. Pretty much the same picture twice, but its pretty and I liked it, so you get it twice.

 Heading back towards Burma Hill, I spotted these guys coming down Burma.  I wish you could tell from the picture how steep this hill is....it's hard just to walk down it w/o sliding.  There's two guys waiting on top of the second drop, and one coming down the drop at the top...he wrecked and flipped over his bike right after I took this picture.

 I talked to them at the bottom and they were "stoked" that at least one person got a picture of them coming down. The guy who biffed was fine.... embarrassed that I saw it and told him he rolled down the hill like a pro...but fine.

 This is where I sat and read a book for a while as Brian finished up his miles. Not a bad place to be.

 And then he came around the corner.  I gotta give him props on his marathon training, he's really doing great! He's getting a lot of his miles in on the trail, and the elevation (he got over 5000 of climbing last week) is helping with his speed when he's running flats at work/in the city.  He's been upping his long run by 2 miles a weekend and is somewhere around 17 miles?  Sunday he got two runs in, a 7.2 in the morning  and a 9.6 in the afternoon, both with a ton of climbing. One was in Briones and one on Diablo.  He's doing really good and is setting himself up to have a great marathon in Feb and hopefully a great 50k in March.  BTW, we were both up at midnight getting our names in to the WTC 50k lottery. : )

Ok, this is not from the trail, but it's beautiful, so here it is!  Myles picked out this tye-dye cake from Duff's line of cake mixes. Duff, as in Charm City Cakes, used to have a tv show, Duff.  it was super easy to make and really really pretty when it was done.  Plus, the batter had almond extract in it and was super good! (no, there's not a chicken sitting on it, that's my salt shaker back there)