Leschi Stairs and cherry season

We debuted the next stair loop today at the group run. I'd first sat down with maps and books and mapped out the run in mid-May. I didn't get a chance to explore the route until a month later. I really wanted to go back to rerun the route but vacation, ragnar and marathon training didn't allow that. So I knew which route I was aiming for but wasn't quite sure of total distances nor was I sure I could find the correct trails through some of the parks.

This was totally successful and a lot of fun! The neighborhoods adjacent to Lake Washington have some really amazing features and I was really happy to get people exploring them. And oh yeah, 6.5 miles took almost two hours to mark the course! It was a tough one!

The dilemma was how to fit marking the stair loop of 6.5 miles with my need to get in an 18 mile long run. I decided to treat that 6.5 miles as a trail run and just run by time. So it took about 1h30-45 minutes to run the course and i needed another 1h30 minutes of running. After marking the course, i headed off trotting back towards our house. However, it is cherry season and I wanted to get some different cherries than the usual suspects (Bing and Rainier) that we can get at our local grocery store.

The University District Farmers' Market was the perfect ending point. K finished the group run and leisurely drove towards the market and parked while i roamed around a bit to get in time on my feet. And they had some great cherries! We got two pounds of a sweet cherry (Sweetheart) and a pound each of two different varieties of sour cherries (Montmorency and North Star).

What's planned? Sour cherry ice cream! boozy cherries! And yes, it's exciting.