longest run of my life

these past two days have been a virtual whirlwind, what with moving, cleaning, unpacking and a long run thrown in for kicks.

my buddy nestor and his fam are in town from pittsburgh, which gave us and kyle the perfect opportunity to reunite as the dykstra/rieber trio in full effizzect. since nestor's staying in downtown, we avoided the 405 altogether and had a bomb meal at sushi gen in little tokyo.

afterwards, kyle helped move my large furniture to the new pad using the rental truck just down the street from my old place. we hit it hard from 10:30pm thru 1:30am but accomplished the lion's share of the heavy lifting, a bit of tetris was needed to finagle a few things into the new pad, but you're talking to a dude who aced geometry in high school.

saturday i returned the rental truck, met up w/direcTV to have my place wired, made back & forth trips to goodwill, met up w/verizon to install the internet, then busted open one of my aged beers in a state of near collapse.

sunday morning i had a three hour run scheduled for trailer canyon in topanga state park, so i trudged out there and hoped for the best. armed with water, gatorade, salt caps & enough fuel, i set out with steven (training for the NYC marathon next month) and ross (ray miller 50m in february 2013) for a 15-ish mile run.

we mapped out a cr-A-zee route including a bunch of single track (the garapito trail shortly after hub junction is the bomb! 2.2m of twisting, darting, duck-under-branches-while-simultaneously-jumping-over-rocks-while-avoiding-the-edge fun) and unrelenting hot fire road thrown in. once we learned there was water available at musch camp about 12m into our run, that became our target... and we barely made it. since i was doing good on hydration, i gave steven one of my gatorade bottles and the three of us arrived at the water fountain on fumes. it was a glorious sight as we took turns dunking our heads under the spout and refilling our packs with glee. just picture three dudes in slo-mo gallavanting around a veritable oasis and that's pretty much what it looked like.

we found the tricky santa ynez trail that eventually led us back to vereda de la montura in the palisades, which is about three blocks from where we parked our car. sunday's run was officially the longest in my lifetime at 17.44m, and i felt surprisingly spry at the end of it. at two months out, i need to work on getting in long runs in order to prepare myself for north face on december 1, so sunday was a great step in preparing myself for the mileage.

this week should be a bit easier since xterra point mugu is up in two weeks, so i'll look forward to lessening the load while i recover from all the moving...