Training in California or Florida?

As a FL native and current resident I'll say:

Go to Cali. PCB is a hole for running. There's the beach for offroad, but that's it. If you go off the island and up into the country of the panhandle to find some dirt roads, you're dealing with straight up necks, my man.

So Florida has those soft white sand beaches, right? If I go there would I be better of running barefoot or trying to wear some kind of shoes? I ran the beach barefoot in Surfside TX a while back - that was a fine-grained hard packed beach so didn't sink much.

Guess I would be in the wrong part of the state to get the OAR experience.

Vanceville, California? There's no such place that I know of and Google doesn't have any results for it nor a map. Do you mean Vacaville, California? While near Napa, Vacaville is a whole different world, not much of a town and what there is not exactly charming. If you were actually staying in Napa this would be a no brainer.

You will be able to find some good farm roads in area to do a long run, but it won't be great running. Depending on the amount of free time you have you could do the drive an hour to Marin for great trail running or the 45 minutes into Napa and run through the vineyards, but of course you'll have limited sunlight in late November. On the up side Vacaville should have excellent weather for running in November, although you could get some rain.

To be honest I don't know what the running is like in Vacaville, but I know I would never go there just to run. Since you won't be doing much running in your taper week maybe your just looking for general info about the area, Vacaville is pretty much of standard mid-size California Centeral Valley kind of place, quite different than the much nicer SF Bay Area communities, although it is pretty close.

I live about 50 miles WNW of Panama City Beach. The November running weather is actually quite good (highs in the mid to low 70s, in the low 50s when you get up) but that's probably the best selling point of the area.

Even if you're running right along the waterline, it's really soft sand, and takes a lot more effort to run the beach there than it would in a hard sand area like Daytona. Easy to screw up the taper or turn an ankle or something along that shore.

In terms of running Front Beach Road/Thomas Drive along the coast, it's possible that time of year because the area is relatively deserted and consequently you really lower your risk of getting hit by a drunk idiot turning out of the twenty bazillion driveways along the coast roads from the Front Beach/Thomas intersection westward. For the best run route, I'd probably dig out the maps of the run course for Gulf Coast Triathlon/Ironman Florida. They send you through some nice and relatively traffic free neighborhoods on the east side of PCB, and the run through the state park can be very pretty.

Sorry, Vacaville not Vanceville. Workshop is actually at Travis AFB so closer to Fairfield than anything. I'm guessing we'll be through by 4:00 each day so hopefully can get out and run before it gets dark.

Vacaville is a commuter town with nothing to do. Fairfield is full of Chair Force types who yap all day about killing Arabs. I always wonder why they skirted combat by joining the Air Force and Navy. If the coach is good then I'd go.

People join the Air Force over other services for two reasons:a. They realize that people who join the Army are either brainwashed morons or masochists;b. they don't like getting seasick.I have no idea what part of my post gave you the impression there are coaches involved in the workshop. Thanks for the useless information.

Frisco Area resident wrote:

Vacaville is a commuter town with nothing to do. Fairfield is full of Chair Force types who yap all day about killing Arabs. I always wonder why they skirted combat by joining the Air Force and Navy. If the coach is good then I'd go.