Last run of the year

I made it out of work on time to go for a trail run with two of my co-workers. Our trail run was to start at the far west end of Forest Park at the trail head for Wildwood Trail. We were planning on running 10 miles which was the exact same as Team Red Lizard was doing for Purge and Spurge that morning. We couldn't make it for the morning section, so we decided to do it in the afternoon, and hopefully finish before dark (4:30). This course is a point to point run, so we parked my Jeep at the finish and took Tim's SUV to the start. I am glad I decided to take the Jeep, their was still plenty of snow and mud up there.

We headed out on the trail at 2:15, which was 15 minutes later than we had hoped, but not too bad. After a couple hundred yards of running, we knew that we were in a little deeper than we thought. The trail was very muddy from the recent rain, and plenty of downed trees and limbs from the wind. This slowed our progress a bit, and then when we were in sections that didn't get much sun, there was still plenty of snow on the ground. I had to walk some of these because other runners and hikers pack it down, but it becomes full of holes, or ruts, or whatever you call them. Enough so, it was enough to worry about rolling your ankle, so I just walked on these sections.

Tim and David, the two guys I was running with are much better runners than I, but they waited up for me, and if one of them was on the side of the trail, tying shoes, answering nature calls, whatever, I would leap ahead, and shortly they would catch up. This worked well, you had some time to be out alone, but always knowing someone wasn't far and someone to talk to when you wanted.

We ended up a half mile from my Jeep after only seven miles of running. We really wanted to do 10 miles, and we happened to see someone on the access road that went to my Jeep. We talked to this guy for a bit, and he informed us of this trail that was about 1/2 to 1 mile down wildwood that went up to fire lane 7, which would loop us back to our Jeep, and it would put us close to 10 miles.

Tim took off like a bat outta hell, David was trying to keep up with/catch Tim and I was trying to keep David in sight. We got about a mile and half further down the trail, maybe a bit further, and we decided this guy didn't know what he was talking about. By this time the trail was starting to get dark, and in the shades of the trees, even darker. Thankfully we had brought our head lamps just in case. Although, we never did use them, our eyes adjusted well, and there was still some light sneaking in. Oh, and we were all out of water by this point, we were at ten miles, so we had planned about right, but we went a little longer than expected. I will put more water in my camelback next time, than what I need.

We turned around and head back to the access road that Wildwood crossed earlier. About 3/4 of a mile from the end, all of us "hit the wall" and we were suffering bad. I screwed up and didn't eat enough calories, as did all of us, so we were out of energy and now we were running very slow. On our way back, we found the trail the guy was talking about, it was about 1/2 mile from where we talked to the guy, so it turns out he does know what he's talking about. David and I blamed this mistake on Tim. Since Tim took off like a shot, he was our leader and he was supposed to be looking for this trail, and we were just chasing him. He should have stopped at this trail! Truth was, we were chasing, but also the mud and snow made it rather technical so it was hard to take your eyes off of the immediate trail in front of you.

After noticing the trail, we decided to keep going the way we knew would get us back to the Jeep, rather than taking a chance with the late night. Once we were on the access road, it was straight up the mountain, so we all walked, and groaned our way up the hill to the Jeep. It was pitch black as we showed up to the Jeep, and it had just started to rain, so we weren't soaked.

Our ten mile trail run ended up being 12 miles with 4,310 feet of elevation gain. So, we got a good workout for our end of year run!

Oh, and one of my Christmas presents was a lightweight digital camera so I can take pictures while trail running (some amazing views on some of my runs!). Here are the pictures from the run.