I am not a morning person, but I am also not a person that likes to miss out on the opportunity to run in a new place.
So, before a busy day at the Mid-Atlantic Tourism Public Relations Alliance Media Marketplace in Winchester, Virginia, I got up early, put my running shoes on and left my hotel for the run at about 5:45 a.m.
This conference was held Sept. 12-14, and the run was Sept. 13. As you can probably guess from my delay in writing this post, I have been very busy recently!
I actually run so rarely in the morning on weekdays that I basically forgot until the day before that it would still be dark when I started running. But I wasn’t going to pass up my chance to run in a new-to-me place. The three-day conference was packed with activities, and the morning would be my only chance to get a run in.
I was staying at the Hilton Garden Inn, which is a nice hotel but wasn’t in a super interesting area for running. I decided to run toward the Old Town area, which is where the conference was, then run around in that area some before heading back to my hotel.
The Old Town has a nice pedestrian plaza that is closed off to traffic. I found this a nice place to run. There’s also a running store on this plaza, Runners’ Retreat, which I returned to the next day just before leaving to go home to Salisbury. I bought a shirt I’d seen through the window that had the state of Virginia and an apple on it.
There seemed to be apples everywhere in Winchester! I actually came across two large apples on my run (art, not real apples), and there were other large apples that I saw later on my trip. During the Thursday of the conference, I went on a FAM tour called “From Bloom to Brew,” where we visited different apple orchards/markets. I came back to Salisbury with apples and cider (regular and hard — I waited to try the hard cider till I got home; I didn’t partake during work).
There was also the word “LOVE” set up by the Handley Library in Winchester.
Winchester is definitely a hilly area. Although some of the running seemed flat, such as on the plaza, I did make my way up some hills. In the run of 5.52 miles, my watch logged 168 feet of elevation gain, more than what I’d climb on a run of that distance in Salisbury. For example, I ran 5.11 miles in Salisbury yesterday and logged 44 feet of elevation gain, according to my watch.
While in Winchester, I saw a sign or two for the Green Circle Trail, and when I was in an Uber, the driver mentioned there were trails down Jubal Early Drive, which I found was the Abrams Creek Wetlands Preserve. I wanted to get up early on Thursday and run over that way the next morning, but unfortunately one super-early morning was all I could handle, particularly with a packed schedule.
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