Trail runnin

A sold out field gathered this morning for the first race in the Dirty Trail Series. It snowed during the morning and was still snowing a bit when the race started which put a new coating of white stuff over the whole area and made the trails and woods look pretty fresh. This was a prediction run rather than an actual race, which means it doesn't matter what place you finish or what time you run as long as you run as close to your predicted time as you can. The race was a click over 4 miles so I figured I'd be conservative and predict about a 37:30 since there were some pretty long steep climbs on the course, Nate did the same. When we took off the first 1/4 mile was on the road til we hit a set of stairs and then entered into the trails and were still keeping a good steady tempo pace and all sense of time pacing gone completely out the window. Nate, Tony and I said we weren't concerned about getting a prize for being closest to the time, which we most likely wouldn't have hit anyway, so we just kept up the tempo and ran. We ended up finishing with a 33:30, four minutes faster than our predicted time, which was still over an 8 minute mile which was pretty good especially for the trail conditions and the hills that we climbed. We all felt great afterwards and headed out for another hour of running on a different set of trails and finished up running back up Truxell Rd. hill to the entrance road of the Octagon Shelter for a total of 11 miles on a great morning of trail running.

Next up is the Dirty Love 10k (this is not a prediction run, but an actual race) in the North Chagrin trail system on Feb. 12th which we'll be getting xtra mileage in after as well, anyone interested c'mon out.