Runcaching

At a recent meeting of Tampa Bay area bloggers, I was introduced to Geo-caching. That night, I downloaded an app for my phone and (accompanied by Alice‘s birthday party-goers) found my first cache just over a quarter mile from my home. It occurred to me at some point that Geo-caching might be a fun exercise for the cross country or track teams.

Since the district Track & Field championships are tomorrow, I’ve given the distance runners relatively low key workouts this week. Yesterday was supposed to be an easy three mile run, but everybody thought that was pretty boring. So, we went geo-caching instead. We grabbed some stickers from the school’s advancement office and off we went. The first cache was a half mile run away. We found the camouflage painted peanut container pretty quickly and it was full of goodies. We traded some of our stickers for a few goodies from the cache, signed the log and headed off to the next cache a half mile in the other direction.

That cache was a duct tape wallet with a signed dollar inside! Score! The third cache was another 3/4 mile away. We were excited because it was described as a coffee can, so we expected a lot of goodies inside. We headed to the cache position and looked around. We found a dead dog and some other things we would have preferred not to see, but unfortunately did not find the hidden cache. We know we were close because others described seeing the dead dog near the cache so perhaps we’ll have to return and look for it again.

By the end of practice, we had run about 3.5 miles in the process of Geo-caching. Sure, there was a lot of downtime while we searched for the caches, but it was planned as an easy day anyway. The goal was simply to get some movement in our legs without taxing ourselves too much. We accomplished that goal and everyone had fun!

On the personal running front, I’ve logged 15.5 miles so far this week so I should end up with 20-25 miles by the end of the week and that’s exactly where I want to be.