I started Saturday off with a 17.5-mile run with Nate and his friend Ben, and my boss Jim joined us partway along. It was a beautiful morning, and I was able to finish the last two miles quite strongly.

For the social part of the day, Mer and I headed up to the west side of Cleveland, right up to the lake, where we hiked the Edgewater Park Trail. The trail is a good little trail in that it starts on bluffs overlooking the lake and city, and takes you down to the beach, and then out to a pier and breakwater. I was a bit amazed in that the day was pretty nearly perfect, with lots of sun and around eighty degrees, but the beach was not crowded. There was still a good number of people around, but it was far from packed.

There seemed to be a festival or competition going on – there was a PA system, and tents set up all over a field near the beach, and lots of people wandering around in matching t-shirts. I stopped and asked a friendly group of people, and they said it was the Cleveland Corporate Challenge. It seems there is a competition every summer involving a wide range of activities, and this particular Saturday seemed focused on tug-of-war and things of that nature. They certainly had a good turnout.

Mer and I wandered the pier and out on the breakwater as far as we could before the path disappeared. It was a fun place to watch people and boats, and we did not rush along. We then took the rest of the path back to the car, and headed home.

I had planned on going to see our friends’ band, Bethesda, give a concert at a coffeehouse, but I had some stomach issues, probably from dehydration from the run in the morning or the walk in the afternoon. So, we stayed home, and I wanted to see if there was a movie I could rent from Amazon.com. It had a recommendation of the animated version of Batman: Year One, which was based on a comic book I had loved back in the early nineties. That made for my plans for the evening. Based on renting that, I also saw a recommendation for the animated version of the comic book Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, so we watched that as well. Mer was a good soul and humored me, and it was much fun to see those stories “come to life” in an animated film. I’m sad to have missed Bethesda, but it was a nice substitute.