Three generations of women in this pic from 23 to 77 years of age.  Karen told me to cash in some miles on United and fly down to visit my mom for the Mother’s Day weekend.  I arrived on Thursday night and will return Tuesday.  I brought two pairs of running shorts and to my surprise have run two days in a row.  So right now I’m doing laundry.

I can run out the door from my mom’s house in Round Rock and hit a hike and bike trail after about 1.5 miles.  The trail runs along Brushy Creek.  The Garmin comes in really handy when you just run out the door without a good sense of distance.  There aren’t any mile markers along the Brushy Creek path.  Well, there are numbered markers of some sort but I have no idea what they reference.

I ran 5 miles on Friday.  It was much warmer than what I’m used to in Colorado, and I think it affected my pace.  But it was bearable.  Not today though.  I should have turned around earlier but I pushed it to the end of the path at just over 4.5 miles.  After 6 miles on the return I stopped to walk.  There was a little park at this spot and I was able to replenish liquids at a water fountain.  And from there I mixed walking with running to the finish.  This of course reminded me of my last big run down in these parts – the Austin Marathon in February.  I folded in that run after 16 miles and walked at each of the remaining 10 or so aid stations while drinking water.  That failed run was from starting out too fast.  Today was the heat.  Either way, Texas wins again.

I knew the morning would be cool – low 70s if not upper 60s.  That would have been nice, but I needed to hang with my mom until she was ready to run errands and it was 1pm before I could get out.  Tomorrow I’ll run early.  Even though Brushy Creek is lined with trees and some nice rock bluffs, there’s total sun exposure past noon.  It’s been a cold spring so far in Colorado, a couple of weeks ago I was running in a snow storm.  My body has been pulled from the freezer and thrown into the oven.  That’s not an easy adjustment.  Hope I at least get a little tan from it.  As if my zero pigment skin can tan.

Not the perfect segue but that makes me think of some family history my mom related to me this morning.  We were talking about her dad’s side of the family, the Freitags; and how even though they were mostly dark skinned Austrians and Germans,  at a family reunion several years back they were all certain I resembled a Freitag.  I don’t but apparently there were a few blonde German Freitags.  The Freitag clan came from a town near the German-Austrian border that is no longer there.  It was destroyed by wars over a century ago.  Not sure if that means the Austro-Prussian Seven Weeks War in 1866, or simply the re-occurring wars during that time frame.  But this is information I already knew.

And maybe I knew this too at one time and forgot, but this morning my mom told me that my Irish Great Grandfather Mahoney migrated to Chicago from Ireland, and married a red haired Italian also just off the boat.  And ironically the light skin complexion on the Mahoney side comes more from this maternal Italian than the paternal Irish.  I’ve read a book or two on pre-historic Celtic migration patterns and while their initial homeland is theorized to start in southern Germany or the northern Alps, they did in fact migrate through Italy.  They even sacked Rome in 390 BC but history didn’t record much of the Celts.  They moved through Spain and contributed to Basque culture – have you ever seen blonde Spanish – and formed their only nation-state in Ireland.  My high school sweetheart was Mexican-American, but as blonde as me.  People sometimes commented we could pass as brother and sister, although I found such semblances specious beyond our hair color – and perhaps we sparred like siblings.  Not sure what this has to do with running, but visiting with my mom on Mother’s Day weekend has left me thinking of genealogy.  The running theme to this blog is really just sort of a guideline – I can write about anything.  It’s my blog.