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All the leafs!

November 1, 2018 (Morning)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
With practice canceled today, Lauren Silberman and I decided to take advantage of the glorious 70-degree weather and gorgeous fall colors to see if we could get ahead in the leaf-catching competition. We snuck onto Columbia Country Club (the golf course with those really high nets overlooking Connecticut Avenue between East-West Highway and the Beltway which the closed off part of the CCT cuts through). I'd only been there twice in my life, once when I snuck on with Anthony and some alums and another time I think in high school when I was coming down the CCT and crawled under the chain-link fence. The leaves were AMAZING! I'm not sure if I've ever caught 26 leaves in a single run before; if so, it hasn't been for many years. There was just enough wind to shake them off the trees but not enough to make them hard to catch. Twice I even caught clumps of pine needles; those are particularly tricky because they fall fast and they spin. Honestly, even after two dozen leaves the excitement of making a catch never grew old. Each leaf brought with it the same satisfaction of catching a fly ball in the outfield during little league, plus a satisfying crunch!

After half an hour of this nonsense, including getting called out for being on the golf course, we headed back toward Connecticut Ave but as we left I noticed the gate was open to an adjacent manor, a large high-fenced property at Jones Bridge and Connecticut (behind Einstein Bros and Starbucks) that I'd never before noticed. Turns out its a conference center with a lot of construction going on - hence the open gate that allowed me to bypass the guard post. I caught several more leaves there but ultimately decided there was nothing special enough to sneak over the fence for in the future - no trails, at least. I did at the end of the run get to climb a brick wall back into Lauren's parents' subdivision where my car was parked.