I made a mistake when ordering something from Lowe’s.  Lowe’s isn’t super close to our house, but we get Discover Cash Back Reward cards for it, so that makes sense.  Instead of having the order delivered to Maple Grove where we usually go, it got delivered to West St. Paul.  It isn’t a huge difference in time to get to West Saint Paul, but it seems a lot further away. I was able to incorporate my visit there with a run at a new location.

Battle Creek Regional Park is a place that the kids and I visited once, but didn’t spend a ton of time at. It has some Mountain Bike and Cross Country Ski trails so I decided to go for my run there. Not having been there before I did some research and found this blog that offered a route to run. I read through their route once and proceeded to go for my run.  It didn’t make a ton of sense, but some of the parts stuck out to me as I started running.

The workout was 6×800.  I didn’t want to start my run by going up the sledding hill, so I made some random turns here and there in the “flat” section of the ski trails. I ended up going past the same point a few times once I entered the wooded area.  It was also hard to know if the single track I was on were Mountain Bike or hiking trail.  The ground was dry and I never saw any bikers, so it wasn’t a big deal.  Everything make more sense now having been there. I only made one real mistake and ended up on a dead end trail on private property.  The only other real error was during the cool-down I almost went on a long loop away from the parking lot. I wasn’t too worried about getting lost or anything as long as I got my workout in.

I never saw the view from the Bluff of downtown St. Paul, but I did see some cool views of the Mississippi River. There were plenty of hills on this one so the intervals really depended on whether it was more up or down!

4:39

3:41

4:44

3:50

4:50

6:12 (this one was uphill, I ran into the dead-end and almost vomited up a bug that flew into my mouth)

The total was 5.5 mile in 1:02.

This picture is from when the kids and I were there: