Adventure run in O'Neill Park

I had a lot of fun in O'Neill park yesterday morning. As a matter of fact I never run in O'Neill park before and was not even too sure about where it was located - although it is literally next door to where I live.

The morning was lovely although it already started to warm up at 6:40 when I left home:





Right on my first mile into the park I hit several streams crossing the trail. The first one was pretty narrow to jump across. But the second and the third one were wide enough and I had to use boulders half-submerged in the stream - most of them shaky and slippery.



As I am not used to things like that, it was pretty scary at first and I could not help picturing myself falling down and hitting my head against one of those stones. I was ready to turn around and find another trail :-)



But after you cross those little rivers a couple of times, you get much more comfortable about them. They are pretty beautiful after all:



The trail on the other side was mostly flat for several miles:



In a while the trail dives into a pretty dense forest. I have never been to a rainforest but this is how I picture it. You do not feel there like you are in Southern California anymore:







I met a couple of deer on my way. The little one was jumping high above the grass like a kangaroo:



Here are few more cool pictures from the run:







I took only 24oz of Gatorade with me and completely ran out of it around mile 10, still having 3 more miles to go. As it was getting pretty hot by then those last 3 miles were not most of the fun:



A picture of my shoes I took specifically for the dirty-shoes contest:



Mileage: 13.1 miles
Time: 2:09:40
Average pace: 9:54 min/mile