Yesterday the federal government was closed for George H.W. Bush's state funeral. That meant I had a surprise day off in the middle of the week.

Seemed like the perfect opportunity to go for a nice long run in my new shoes.



I realized on my last couple of runs that my shins and feet were getting kind of sore, and I was trying to remember how long ago I'd bought my previous pair of shoes.

So I looked back into my Amazon account and discovered I'd ordered them at the beginning of April. They were 8 months old!

When I slipped my new pair on for the first time, it felt like I was running on clouds.

My normal running route had some road closures yesterday because of the motorcade for the funeral, so I got creative whenever I ran in to a barricade or line of police officers.



I stopped to take this shot of the officers lined up alongside the World War II Memorial. Bush's motorcade was slated to drive past after the funeral on his way to Andrews for the flight back to Texas.



My original goal was to run about seven miles, but with some of my detouring, I ended up running eight.

I started out heading toward the Capitol building and extended my normal loop by a block or two to make sure I'd clear the security barricades. On the back side of the Capitol grounds, I did have to awkwardly hop over a half way toppled temporary fence to get out of the complex.


This shot was from my run on Monday, when they were starting preparations. The weather Monday was also much nicer than yesterday.

From the Capitol grounds, I continued on to the Mall. Normally, it's packed with people, but it was weirdly quiet yesterday until I got closer to the motorcade route. That was lined with police officers and people waiting for the funeral to end and the motorcade to drive past. It was a cold day, and those people probably at least two hours to wait from the time I was there running.

There was a helicopter doing slow circles over that part of the Mall from the Washington Monument out of over the Tidal Basin and near the White House. Probably keeping an eye on everything going on. Security has been much higher in DC since Monday.

I finished my run by looping around the Lincoln Memorial and heading back home.

Other than some calf tightness around mile 4.5, everything about the run felt pretty good. I stopped to walk once (and of course had some slow downs when navigating barricades and stuff), but overall, I felt good and strong on my run, and I'm not too sore today.

I'm sure a lot of the credit goes to my new shoes, but I'm also happy that I'm slowly but surely starting to build up a solid running base again.