Picture of the week ~ Lady Liberty

Nookachamps half marathon training run

My husband and I have just about completed our goal list of Spartan races to enter for 2017. We are toying with entering some road or trail runs. We may just end up doing the Spartan races as our "paid" entry races. We really enjoy our long weekend runs together. I look forward to these as "our" time together. While the option to enter other events is there, it seems slim that we'll pay to run in many. 

One upcoming race option is the NOOKACHAMPS HALF MARATHON. We went to Mt. Vernon today to run the COURSE. The event starts and ends at SKAGIT VALLEY COLLEGE. My father and our daughter ran it together in January of this year, you can read about that day's race HERE.

We began today at about noon with rain, dark and windy conditions, it was in the low 50's so comfortable for running. 

Running in a downpour.

I recently got a new camera. When I bought my Surface pro 4 at Best Buy they gave me a $150 gift card. I thought about all of the conditions I'm in when I take pictures, so I bought a Fujifilm FinePix XP90 because it's waterproof, shockproof and freezeproof. I took the pictures on Thursday's hike to MADRONA CREST with it and I was pleased with how easy it was to operate and with the quality of the pictures and videos. Since the day was so dark today, I wondered how the pictures would turn out, and again I am pleased. I took the photo below while we were running to see how much it might blur, but it turned out pretty good.

We saw Snow
Geese and Swans on the course. I didn't get any photos of the Swans but we saw about 100 in the fields and flying in the air. It was nice to see that they were making their way here for the Winter.

I took this video of the Geese flying with a very dark sky behind them.

https://youtu.be/9obykNldvdk

The course goes through the small town of Clear lake, before heading uphill. So far the course had been fairly flat, but the rest of the course had a few good uphills.

More Snow Geese

The course has a short out and back to add some distance, it was flat and scenic. It went through a few farms and we saw Horses, Goats, Pigs and Cows besides the Geese and Swans. 

Heading out...

and heading back.

I didn't get a picture of the road sign before this water level measuring post, but it said "Road may Flood". Thankfully today we didn't have to run through water, but if it had been there we would have know how deep it was.

After we ran up several long hills, we were back in town with only a couple of miles left of today's distance. The road's name with the City limit sign was fitting "Swan" road,

The home stretch!

The photo below shows where the finish area will be on race day.

We were pleased with our day's efforts. 

Endomondo stats - 

total miles - 13.29

total ascent - 308 feet

 total descent - 466 feet

average pace - 13.41

time - 3:01:47