Salem, Oregon's
Running & Walking Club Site
Home of
Willamette Valley Road Runners (WVRR)
www.WVRoadrunners.org.

Run Like A Kid Again

Come on now, just how many 5k, 8k, 10k, half marathons, and marathons can you run before you're totally bored out of your skull? After about 50 of each you've probably reached your potential and already know within two places just where you're going to finish. It's about time to get back to basics and restore some excitement to your life. Remember the joy when you first discovered that you were born to run? Well it can still be had. Some of us call it adventure running. Just pick out a mountain and run around it, or a river trail and run up or down it, or a meadow or lake and run to it. Run and walk at your own pace, stop and eat and take pictures of vistas or wildlife. Become part of your environment and discover new things about yourself. It takes awhile to get over the guilt of not racing or punching your stopwatch, but the ensuing freedom of blasting down a pine needle covered trail with all your senses firing on all cylinders is well worth the tradeoff.

Your adventure can start off fairly small like running around Silver Creek Falls or parts of McDonald forest near Corvallis, or Wildwood trail near Portland and then keep building into monstrous undertakings like around Mt. Hood, St. Helens, or Mt. Rainer. You can run the 42 mile Rogue River Trail, the 30 mile McKenzie River Trail, or all or part of the 78-mile Umpqua River Trail. You can even work up to really stupid things like a double-crossing of the Grand Canyon in 1 day.

Once you get into adventure running, you'll discover a wonderful community of hundreds of people that assist and encourage each other. With an e-mail list it isn't a lot of trouble and takes only a few days to organize a get-together. It's really great to be excited again about putting one foot in front of the other.

Lee Fields