Once a year we get to travel to the west coast for work for a weekend. My first two years with the Falcons it was up in Seattle (great city BTW) to play the Seahawks, then last year we went to San Diego and in 2013 it was a trip to the Bay Area to play the 49ers. We ended up staying in Palo Alto, two or three miles from Stanford so no running in San Francisco, but it still made to two solid days of running in California.
Day One: West Coast trips are always interesting because we leave a day earlier than any other road trip, which means I normally get one full afternoon to explore my surrounds. In Seattle that lead to finding one of my favorite city runs of all time out to Gas Works Park and in San Diego I got to get sort-of-kind-of lost in Balboa Park. As for Palo Alto, I decided to venture over to Stanford to check out the campus. I scouted out a couple of spots I wanted to hit up at walkthrough in the morning which was at Stanford Stadium and after a light lunch I set out for what I figured would be between 10 and 12 miles depending on how I was feeling.
I have actually been to Stanford once before about 10 years ago when I ran in the USATF Junior National Championships. It was an awesome experience; I spent almost a week in California with my Dad, my coach and teammates Mark Miller & Mary Proulx. Mary ran the open women’s 10k and I ran the junior men’s 10k. I ended up finishing 13th out of 17 runners with a PR at the time of 32:16. I was running right with Nick End (a fellow Saucony Hurricane) but fell off the pace in the last couple of laps. I believe that Peter Najem and I are the only Keene State runners to run at a USATF Championship and not finish last though.
It was cool to be able to run in a couple of the same spots around the campus and reminisce about that race a little bit. I ran the two and a half miles from the hotel through Palo Alto all on University Ave, following that until I hit the main campus and quad. From there I just started taking different turns and trying to explore. I ended up making my way out to Lagunita, which is a big pond that has a dirt trail around it. The pond was empty so it was pretty cool looking, like a giant sunken meadow. I ran around the trail then found what looked like some hiking trails across the road, but I was already six miles into the run and knowing that I still had at least five miles to go before I got back, so I decided it was time to head back through campus. I ran through a couple of different doors and quads, one was field turf which I thought was pretty cool, and ended up next to the track. I made my way down past Maples Pavilion (where they play hoops) then looped around the football practice fields and the total awesome outdoor aquatics center. They had trampolines set up next to the diving pool and people were practicing their gainers and whatnot.
After being bewildered by the pool situation I cut through Chuck Taylor Grove (sweet kicks bro!) then onto the track for a couple of laps to relive the glory days. At one end of the track they have three big pillars, one for national champions, one for Olympians, and one for world record holders, pretty impressive. After marveling at that for a few minutes I made my way back through Palo Alto to the hotel. The run turned out to be 11, my longest in a while, but I felt pretty good afterwards.
Day Two: I trying to decide where to run on day two over breakfast when our strength and conditioning coaches invited me to join them for a trail run in the Santa Cruz mountains…bingo bango. Our head strength coach is from Cupertino so he had a great run planned out at a place called Rancho San Antonio that has 23 miles of trails. If I ever get back to that area I will 100 percent be visiting this spot. It was awesome.
We started our run at the base of the mountains and wound our way to the appropriately named Deer Hollow Farm. As we made our way to the farm we saw a ton of deer, including two bucks, which I don’t ever remember seeing during a run. I see does and little bambi looking deer all the time, but rarely (if ever) a buck. After passing the farm we came to the entrance of the trail de jour, the Wildcat Loop Trail.
We decided to heed the warning of the picture above…which was stay on the trail and watch out for the cartels growing weed in the hills.
It was a little chilly at the base of the hills but once we started climbing it warmed up very quickly. The run was only 5.6 miles (according to my Garmin) but featured over 700 feet of elevation gain. It was a fairly easy run for me as I just stuck to the pace that AJ & Jonas were setting. Jonas and I ended up dropping AJ as he was battling some hip issues on the climb. We stopped at the top to take a few pictures and regroup. You can’t see it in the pictures because of the haze/smog but you could see the bay from outlook we stopped at. I’ll let the picture show what it looked like.
The way down was fun, lots of switchbacks and a bunch more wildlife, black squirrels, deer, and turkeys in addition to the cows at the farm. Post run we drove around the area a little bit with AJ showing us some wineries and a nearly empty reservoir. It was crazy, this giant lake was almost completely empty and normally it looked like it was 40 or 50 feet deep, no surprise they have wildfires out there. Unfortunately we didn’t have a ton of time before the buses started leaving for the game, so we headed back to the hotel, overall though it was an awesome place to run. If I had the chance I would have definitely done some exploring.
Here's the data from Strava...
Here's the data from Strava...
