The Buddy Bones Bridge Marathon

Oops, we did it again. Me 'n Buddy Bones, for the second time in five days, ran a marathon. That Buddy is one heck of a running dude and his imagination and lust for adventure matches my own. Now that I have a training buddy to run with, there is no telling what I might accomplish or how much fun I might have. Let the games begin.

The bridge between Greeenwood and Sidon

Wednesday morning I knew when we left the house that 26.2 was the goal, and we left about the same time as we did five days ago, 9:45 am. Originally we had planned to drive to the Tanglefoot Trail and run there, but sometime during the night before or early morning, I woke up and remembered that my inspection sticker was very expired. I will get a ticket for sure, I thought, so I began to scheme on Plan B.

Plan B turned out to be a lot like the Buddy Bones River Marathon. We shuffled to Highway 82 and like last time we crossed the bridge headed south and went out into the inustrial park. When we got to the old Highway 49, however, instead of running straight out as far as you can to the levee, we took the little side road to the new highway and ran over the Pelucia Creek Bridge and then ventured into Malouf Trailer Park which led us back to the old 49. This was my third time running this stretch of road and I liked it. When we exited the old highway half was between Greewood and Sidon and went west over the Yazoo River Bridge, we were on roads I had never run. I like that.

The only irritable thing of the day was the wind which I had to battle all the way from Greenwood. We crossed the bridge at 8.65 miles and when we turned north, finally we had the strong wind to our backs. I changed the run/walk pattern to 4.0/.65. When we started back running north of the river bridge, our pace was the fastest we had run all day. I was starting to get stoked about beating last week's time.

Finally in the country

Basically, from crossing the bridge until we got back to Greenwood, we followed the river along a lonely gravel road. At one point, the river became the French Bend Cutoff and then the Yazoo River again, but we were always beside a body of water. When we crossed over the bridge at Fort Pemberton and entered the island of north Greenwood, I saw we were going to have to do some additions to get our 26.2 in, so we went behind Walmart, out John Pittman Drive and crossed the Tallahatchie River and ran out Wade Road and then back into Greenwood and to the house.

We beat our first marathon by twenty-three minutes then decided to cool down for a total of twenty-seven miles. Inside, the cats stalked me knowing I was about to crash. When I did crash, they crashed with me and we had us one heck of a nice nap.