Scary Halloween run...

It's scary how my mind works. I woke up this morning, realized it was Halloween and immediately began thinking of words I could spell with my Garmin. I thought of spooky, but 'k' is a difficult letter to draw. I thought of eerie, but it gave me less than three miles. Then I thought of scary. With a little work, that got me to 4.03 miles which, scary as it may seem, is all I needed to make October a 250-mile month. Having planned my route, I headed out the door.

I was really stiff at first. My legs were not happy to be moving after yesterday's 50K. They would have preferred staying in bed. They are stupid, so I just told them to shut up and keep going. In order to make my 'y' look right, I had to run down an alley that I've never run before, at least not in the dark. It was not much fun. The surface was pretty uneven. Thankfully, I made it through without twisting or breaking anything.

Just after coming out of the alley, I met up with a walker. He said hello out of the darkness. It made me jump. I hadn't seen him despite his neon green reflective jacket. I said hello back and kept running.

The rest of the 'y' and all of the 'r' were pretty uneventful. No one to see. Nothing exciting happening. As I was running over to begin the 'a', however, I saw a blinking red light. It was my peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich-loving dog friend and his master, Brandon. I greeted both of them, ran around the 'a' and met up with them again. Brandon said, "Only 99 miles to go." I glanced at my Garmin and replied, "No. 98 and a half." Silly stuff!

I ran the 'c' and pushed on into the 's'. Before I was even near the top of the 's', my Garmin decided to get scary. The low battery alert popped up. I saw it, hit enter and picked up my pace considerably. There was no way that stupid thing was going to quit before I finished my 4.03 miles. I wanted an official satellite image of this historic run. Running down the hill on Maple and then up it, I kept waiting for it to die. It didn't. As I approached Welton, things got scary again. I had mapped the route and it had come out to 4.19 miles. It was clearly going to be short of that. It appeared it might be short of the 4.03 I absolutely had to have. In the end, I ran a couple of steps past the intersection and 4.03 rolled onto the screen. I hit stop.

I reset my Garmin there at the corner of Welton and Maple, started it running again and walked toward home. I've been trying to drain the battery every morning to see if it would help. It ran for 7:15 more, then croaked. I guess I'm going to have to send it in and see if it can be fixed. Forty-four minutes is not an acceptable battery life. Actually, it's scary!