Trails and more trails

L.L.Bean Trail Run

Yesterday I hit the L.L.Bean trails with Jim and Tom, both of whom are quickly becoming trail junkies. The trails were again perfect and the weather even more perfect. We again took it
easy, running just over 4.25 miles at a 9:00 pace. My buddy Chuck Hazzard checked out the trails Sunday and got a little mixed up, which is quite easy to do out there. Regardless, lost or not, it's just good to be able to get out and run. Amen.

Tonight I headed over to meet the Trail Monsters at Twin Brook. It has been a few weeks since I have met up with the crew and it was good to run with them again. The temps were perfect for a nice hard run. The usual suspects Ian, Blaine, Erik and Shawna (sic?) were there, alongwith one of Blaine's running buddies, Dave, Tiki Humphries, Carol (a neighbor), and another woman whose name I did not catch. The group quickly split up according to pace and I ended up running with Ian, Blaine, and Dave. Ian and I spent a good amount of time talking about the upcoming Bruiser race, now included on the MTC website. The pace progressively sped up for each mile of the 10K, starting at a pedestrian 8:56 with the last mile at 7:30, not bad on these trails. In addition, the last two-tenths found the four of us "racing". Trying to keep up with Blaine left me feeling like I was have an out of body experience. I was definitely out of my comfort zone, but it felt good to open up my hips. Good stuff. The 10K run took 50 minutes with an average pace of 8:00 and an average HR of 152.

I talked with Blaine and it looks like we will be meeting out at Bradbury at 6 AM Saturday morning. The 12 hour Mountain Bike race starts at 8 AM so we want to make sure we are off the course when the race starts. Then I may head over to do the Pineland 10K at 9 AM. Hope to see some of you there.