Let’s just say that this morning’s run was a little more interesting than we had planned.
The schedule called for 50 minutes easy with 4 x 100m stride outs at the end. Nathan and I met at the Edwin Warner Park Nature Center and did most of the run through the park and on the Harpeth River Greenway. As expected my legs felt a little creaky at the beginning after the hilly run through Percy Warner on Saturday. This steadily improved throughout the run, though our splits were pretty chill from start to finish. It was nice to enjoy a very easy recovery run until….
On our way back to the cars it became apparent that we would be about 5-minutes short of our 50-minute goal, so Nathan suggested we cross Hwy 100 and run a few minutes on Harpeth Bend road before returning to the park. When we came to Hwy 100, the traffic was so thick it appeared as though it would take a while to cross. As an alternate plan, Nathan suggested that we run through the Ensworth High School campus which is next door to Edwin Warner Park.
For those of you outside of Nashville, Ensworth represents the pinnacle of elitism with an annual tuition that is more than many private colleges. As a matter of fact it actually looks much more like a college campus than a secondary school. When we started running through the entrance I joked that we would probably be setting off motion and heat sensors and Nathan fired back that there were probably snipers watching us.
I suggested that we follow the lower drive which is well away from the main buildings so as not to look suspicious. As we were running through there I noticed a small parking lot and said “I wonder who they make park all the way down here…it must be the house elves (reference to Harry Potter).”
Just as we passed through the parking lot we came to their athletic fields and decided to turn back for the park. Right after turning we saw that a Hummer H3 was headed our direction. It quickly stopped and a security guard jumped out (why does a high school need Hummers for their security guards?). He asked if we attended school there (I’m 37 ???). When we said “no” he said that we were trespassing on private property and had been reported to security by someone at the school. What was surprising to me was that we had only been on that lower road for about 2 minutes.
He then said that our being on campus represented a “liability issue” and we needed to leave immediately. I told him that we were simply cutting through on a run and would head back to where we came from. He told us that going back that way would take too long and we needed to go past the athletic fields out onto Hwy 100 (really pleasant guy). Though I didn’t want to go onto Hwy 100, we obliged and headed back to the park along the highway.
As we passed back by the entrance to Ensworth next to the park, the Hummer H3 was parked right by the entrance with the security guard enjoying a smoke. I assume he wanted to doubly make sure we did not come back onto the school property. I waved at him as we passed by back into the park.
After the 50 minutes was completed we did 4 x 100m stride outs on the greenway back to our cars. Our average pace for the 50 minutes was just over 9:00 per mile, and the average pace for the strides was 5:58. Other than our little adventure at Ensworth, it was a pretty enjoyable run.
Beast Mode…ON!