When my alarm went off at 6:15  Saturday morning, I was in such a deep sleep that I didn’t hear it for a couple of minutes.  The snuggly-warm draw of my bed was almost too much for me, but I had people to meet and miles to run so after hitting the snooze alarm twice, I peeled myself out of bed… just as I heard raindrops hitting our bedroom skylights.  A quick look at Doppler radar showed some rain in the area, but passing through in front of the big line of rain that was heading our way later that morning, and for the rest of the day.  Since I’m always ready for a Saturday morning party on the trail, I got Bill up and by the time we got dressed, the rain had stopped.

We drove in the fog and arrived at our meeting place just as the clock struck 7:30 and it started drizzling.  After waiting about ten minutes for any late comers (none came), Bill and I decided we were the only ones crazy enough to run in this kind of weather so we took off and just like that, the rain stopped.  About a mile into our run we met Cruiser Amanda heading back toward us with her Moms Run This Town friends.  After a quick hug and teasing her about two-timing on the Cruisers, we continued on our run just as it started raining again.  Hatless (yep, I’d forgotten to grab my new “Run Happy” hat), I ran looking down so the rain wouldn’t get in my eyes.  Suddenly Bill shouted, “What was that?”  I asked him what he’d seen and just as he told me it looked like lightning, we heard a big BOOM of thunder.  We turned around in our tracks and headed toward our car in a hurry!

Huge power lines run along the W&OD Trail.  We’ve heard them sizzle often when there’s a light rain hitting them, but we weren’t sure if being under them would increase or decrease our chances of getting hit by lightning; that is, would they act as a lightning rod, or would we just be collateral damage.  We decided the best way to stay safe was to get to our car, and fast!

W&ODPowerLinePole

By the time we ran sprinted the two miles back to the parking lot, we hadn’t seen any more lightning or heard any thunder so we continued on with our run.  It rained off and on for the rest of our run, but during one of the breaks we stopped to snap a quick picture to document our “Lightning Run.”

RainyRunDebBill

I’ve mentioned before that the W&OD Trail is really two parallel trails.  One is asphalt and the other is gravel/cinder and it’s called the horse trail.  We decided to switch to the horse trail for a little while when we ran across some icy patches that hadn’t melted from the previous storm.  I love the way the horse trail feels on my legs, but it only takes a nanosecond for me to get little pieces of cinder in my shoes and that drives me nuts, so I rarely run on it.

W&ODHorseTrail

Cinder packed section of the horse trail

The down side of running on the horse trial was the low spots where the rain was creating little muddy ponds just waiting to get our relatively new trail shoes dirty.

BillRunning MuddyTrail

And just in case you didn’t catch the water splashing…

We finished our rainy ten-mile run and returned home thrilled that we were able to get it finished before the heavy downpours.  Later in the afternoon I snapped this picture of the creek in our back yard just as it was starting to overflow it’s banks; and then I rested…

OverflowingCreek

  • Questions:
  • Have you ever gotten caught in an electrical storm? ~ twice
  • Do you prefer to run on asphalt or gravel?
  • Did you get a lot of rain this past weekend?