We took a week off so several of us could attend the Junior Olympics in North Carolina.
We came back to an inferno! Our fifth session was on the first day of the historic heat wave, and we picked a monster of a course for the occasion. Whoever’s in charge of picking these routes needs to be fired immediately.
Fortunately, we started early enough to avoid the worst of the heat that came later in the day. With another record turnout, this time we were off to Golden Gardens Park. It’s a little over two miles to the park, mostly on the flat Burke-Gilman Trail along the tracks. Once we arrived, we did a little running through the beachside groves, and then got down to business with our regular pushups and uchikomi on the beach.
After a break on the playground, enjoying homemade bread from Natalie and scones from Kozue, we set off again. Instead of taking the flat path we arrived on, we opted to take the hundreds of stairs through the forest and up to the top of the bluff. In my mind, I had envisioned us reenacting the Tenri University training videos where they sprint up and down the stairs with ease. In reality, we jogged about a quarter of the way up, and slowly suffered the rest of the way at a pace more suitable for people who haven’t seen the inside of a dojo for the last 15 months.
From the top of the bluff, it was a relatively easy two miles downhill back home, with a brief stop by Sunset Hill Park on the way. By the time we got back, the heat was upon us, and we spent some quality time in our homemade PVC sprinkler.
