I was playing around in Google Earth tonight and decided to look up some old places where I used to live in the town of Odessa, Texas. It really is a lovely place, though the pictures that Google has were apparently taken in the winter. Looks pretty barren. It only looks like that 10 months out of the year.
Click the picture to get a full size view of one of my homes. Those spider web lines are dirt roads leading through the oil fields. We had full reign out there. Some of my best memories from high school happened out there in the oil patch. We carried guns and rifles to shoot snakes and anything else that we fancied. The closest neighbor was about a mile away. We trekked all through those roads. Funny we did not do bicycles. Either we were out in a car, truck, motorcycle or, mostly, just walking around.
From our driveway I could have “run around the block” and been able to do a 6 mile loop while only setting foot on 2 paved roads. Those trails would have been great places to run. And I do remember running them, but not for endurance training. We ran them when we were running from some animal usually.
Of course, I would have never been out there on a training run without a hand gun. I saw some of the biggest rattlers in my life out there. That was a good reason to wear thick boots most of the time. I am not sure what the boots would do for my running pace.
I was just thinking this morning about how I used to bike to Soccer Camp via the Petersburg (VA) National Battlefield and on the back trails and such. Oh to be able to run those trails now, that would be fun
They say you never know how good you had it as a kid until you grow up and start looking back at the good old days.