Sunday's 12.5 Mile Hilly Walk

Sunday's hilly route

What a day! We met at the Sport's Basement on Bryant Street in Potrero Hill today, instead of our regular meeting spot in the Presidio. We do this once a season as it enables us to go to parts of SF that we otherwise couldn't reach in a walk 12-14 miles or less. It's a great walk - we did a very similar one last year, and it is one of my favorites.

In a nutshell, we started in Potrero Hill, walked to Hayes Valley, past the Painted Ladies in Alamo Square, Duboce Park, the Castro, up to Kite Hill, then UP to Twin Peaks. From there, we walked down Twin Peaks to Portola, through Diamond Heights, Glen Park Canyon, through Noe Valley to Bernal Heights, up and down the steepest hill in San Francisco (Bradford Street) then through the Mission and back to Potrero Hill. We stopped for lunch about 6 blocks from our destination, so that's where I turned off my walking app (and recorded my fitbit) but we did finish it up afterwards.

A couple of highlights of the day for me:

It was a pretty warm day, but we started at 7:00am when it was still 59 degrees out. I started off with a light jacket, but it came off within the first 3 miles. I looked at the map and figured out that we'd be walking within 2 blocks of my house in the Castro! I called Dick around 8:30 and asked if he could mind walking down two blocks to meet me so I could give him my jacket and not have to lug it around with me for another 10 miles. He surprised me by bringing Wallace with him (yay!) and the two of them joined me for a few blocks before we went up to Kite Hill. It was so good to see my boys!!

The other highlight was walking back to Bradford Street, which I had only first seen on the same walk about a year ago. That was when I took the photo of the steep part of the street and have since used it as my inspiration/subject of the oil painting that I'm currently working on. It was really cool to walk towards and up that street again and see all of those buildings and trees that I've been studying for the last several weeks. It was actually a pretty surreal and very cool experience!

Dick and I will be leaving with my family later this week on vacation. We'll be away for two weeks, so this was my last training walk of the season. It was a really wonderful one to end it on!