Pafalugerville…Pa-flug-vill…how do you even say this town? When we moved into the Austin area, I had no idea how to pronounce the name of this town. It turns out that the P is silent. I never understand why to add in the letter ‘P’ if it is going to be silent. All the locals tend to correct you on how to say it and it seems it would save everyone a lot of time from the misunderstanding to just remove it. Oh well.

Pflugerville is about 20 miles north of the downtown Austin area and there are about 66,000 people live in the city. My wife and I almost moved there when we originally moved to Austin but didn’t want to have a long commute. Now I travel about an hour to work so that’s a moot point. Anyway, here is the run!

My route would consist of trying my best not to get lost and finishing in about 30 minutes. I had a teacher training to conduct in the town and would be headed back to Austin for another meeting. It sounded more fun to run outside the gym area but it would be a sweaty experience. I started from Planet Fitness (shameless gym plug that isn’t a sponsor) for the shower after and started the old one foot after the other approach.

A scorcher at 97 degrees and time to go!

It was a scorcher indeed. I found myself getting the classic sun burn a few moments in and decided that I needed to run with a dorky bucket hat. In my eyes, it’s pretty cool. No one else would say that though.

I saw a water tower in the distance and decided to make my way towards it. I figured it may be around a mile away and it could lead to a good view of the town center. Onwards I went!

Our first steps on our journey brought us along the main road that went through the town and an adventure awaited. I didn’t see a sidewalk so it would be time to play frogger with cars when it was time to cross the street. Fingers crossed that I would make it to the water tower in one piece.

The shoulder turned out to be a pretty good size which was a good sign for me. It had about six feet of space between myself and the cars. Looks like I would be mostly safe on my side of the road so that was great! As I continued down the road, there turned out to be grassy space on one side too which felt fantastic on the feet. Although there weren’t many sidewalks in Pflugerville, I couldn’t complain about a grassy surface. I continued towards the water tower at about an eight minute mile pace feeling pretty good and knowing that the heat would be hitting me soon.

(You’ll have to turn your device or head sideways to look at the photos since I couldn’t figure out how to turn the images, sorry!)

The housing sure looked nice and even better, there was a sidewalk on that side! I was getting towards the water tower at this point and didn’t find much of a downtown in the area I was running. Maybe one was there, maybe not. Who knows! Probably the locals know.

As I approached the water tower, the sidewalk disappeared again and I found my self handling the heat better than I could have expected. I sustained my pace (mostly because there was not a single incline in sight) and I seemed to be getting used to Texas summer. It only took me three months to succeed on that side of things and I was grateful to have that heat tolerance build up. I still got sunburnt with a bucket hat and sunscreen so you can’t win all the battles in a Texas summer.

I think I hit about a mile and a half of distance when I came upon my destination. Hello water tower!

It was great to arrive in one piece and I couldn’t get any closer to the tower due to the barbed wire fence that you can see in the photo. I must have confused the locals by posing with the water tower. The only thing around it was a grassy field, a couple dumpsters, and one sunburnt Redhead. It turned out not to be the middle of the downtown area but now someone knows for the future. Time to continue the run!

I still had over 15 minutes plus to run so I decided to see what a local neighborhood had in store. There were a few work crews putting up new houses and those guys were working much harder than me. Sure is tough doing construction in the summer time.

As I ran through one neighborhood, I came upon one of my favorite sights at the 2 mile mark. A trail! Wooohooo! I quickly bound down it and was ever so grateful for the shade. It started in an open field and quickly followed a small wooded area on one side with a fence line on the other. It felt great on my feet and the shade allowed me to pick up the pace. I decided to see how far it would lead me.

I continued down the trail with a smile on my face. It went on for almost a mile and I was able to clip away at a decent pace. I saw a few flowers along the way and it ended up at a nice little lake. No one else was along the route and I had it all to myself which made sense with the heat. Surprisingly, my pace felt fine the entire time and I was able to push harder than expected. Once again, my heat training had finally paid off.

When I got to the end, I turned around and headed back to the gym for a quick rinse. My eyes saw one more glorious landmark that signified a good end to the day. A well earned reward indeed! As I ran to it, I had a huge grin upon my face.

It was closed. Oh well.

Overall, Pflugerville was fun to explore and there is probably more to it than I saw on my short stint. I finished the run after hitting around 4 miles and only a little sunburn. Next time I will definitely try the ice cream. Maybe an extra large shake with chocolate chip cookie dough mixed in. Yummmm. The reason I run is mostly food based.

Hope you all had a great August so far and if you have found any new routes, I would love to hear about it!