During the pandemic, my wife and I used to walk our dog around Stanford campus during the weekends. For one thing, it’s just a really sprawling, beautiful campus with “hidden” exhibits, gorgeous tree lined streets, cool looking courtyards and so much more. For another, this was an excuse for us to try different routes as a way to keep things fresh. Otherwise the muscle memory of walking the same route every day was taking a toll! I remember at one point, my wife is like, “you should run one of your 50Ks here”. I mean it’s not everyday that your spouse willing asks you to go run a 50K and be back by lunch 🙂 Here’s my Strava activity:

The Stanford 50K

Seemed kinda fun to run this on Halloween day, also because parking is free on the campus in the weekend. I literally drew up this route the day before and my thinking was to break up the campus into 4 quadrants and try as much as possible not to have overlapping routes. With my car parked in the Quad, I’d checkin to my “aid station” every 7ish miles or so. I’d have to say the hardest part of this run was staying on the route, what with the million turns to make up the distance.

I parked at the Quad right before sunrise and and headed out towards the Dish for the southern quadrant. Had to keep looking at my watch every few minutes to make sure I was hitting all the turns.

The east quadrant was prolly the least “scenic” of all as it whipped me around the athletic centers and a bit along El Camino real. But hey, something new, something different to keep the #50ultrasfor50 going.

I actually got a bit lost in the north quadrant. Drawing routes on Strava doesn’t always take into account private roads or constructions. In fact at one point, my route wanted to go into the hospital driveway with an “ambulance only” sign 🙂 As I was wrapping up this quadrant, I get a surprise text from my wife. It looked like she drove over with our dog to meet me before the last lap. Little did I know she brought costumes for me to wear!

Laughing so hard with my wife at the silliness of the costumes (did you notice the matching tie for the dog?) kept me going for the last stretch of miles. The west quadrant looped me around Lake Lagunita which has a beautiful trail cirumnavigating the lake. There were more hikers and walkers around the campus now and some with costumes. Took my time getting back to the car and finished the run around 5:45. 42 down, 8 more to go!