May Races

Very early in the year, when we were mapping out our races, we thought that there would be a lot of travel (for Kyla) and a general absence of in town races for us to do. Therefore we thought we might take the month of May off, or sign up for a few virtual races. Obviously CoVid-19 forced a lot of changes on our plans and the two virtual races we were “saving” for May got eaten up by our overzealousness in April. Fortunately, a plethora of virtual races presented themselves and all we had to do was plot our own courses, and hand over our money.

With the excellent May weather and Utah people still holding strong to their decision to spend as much time out of doors as possible, we still had trouble with using local parks for our races. The reason I enjoy using parks or running the trail near Kyla’s house is because I don’t like running with a camelbak.

Then, while picking up a virtual race packet at Salt Lake Running company, I found a lovely handheld water bottle and pouch, and suddenly I was more than happy to traverse long stretches of running trail. That presented us with the Jordan River Trail which is smooth enough, flat enough, and gosh darn it, we like it. And in all of our times running the trail we still hadn’t come across any dead bodies NOR had we been murdered. So we used it for both virtual races.

Geek Day 10k

A little company called Virtual Run Events was putting on this race for May 25th. Since Kyla and I don’t usually run on Mondays (Chad runs every day) and the medals arrived before our other 10k medal, we decided to just go ahead and run our race earlier in the month and get it crossed off the list. The weather was so lovely that afterwards Chad and I spent the rest of the day on a giant project in the yard, which is how we unearthed this creature.

Undesirable No. 2 10k

Two weekends later, we reconvened and the exact same starting spot and ran this virtual race from the Harry Potter Running Club. We’d done one of their races a few years back with Ricky and Kyla. Their medals are always great, they are linked to a great cause – different with each race – and the medals always ship out quickly.

One of the things I love about the Jordan River trail is that we get to see the feral kitties, so much so that I’ve stopped pausing the run to photograph them. This month, during both of our races and almost all of our training runs, we saw a lot of baby and teen duckies wandering around with their hissing parents. I tried not to piss off the parents too much with my photo taking. I failed.