January 2020 Monthly Running Challenge

Avidkeo wrote: »

RunsOnEspresso wrote: »

So... in talking to my coach and looking at my 2020 plans I have decided to do an ultra in 2021. My plan is to build up my trail distance this year, do a 20 mile in January and 50K in March. The 20M being a "warm up" to the 50k. I've ran or hiked most of the trails already. What is wrong with me??

I think you have the @PastorVincent virus. It's really contagious...

rheddmobile wrote: »

I am so doomed y’all.

My husband and I drove out to Stanky Creek to practice for the 8k run next week, which is the next race in our series. We are so not in shape for this! At least nobody fell in the creek today, which believe me is a thing that has happened to both of us in the past.

Stanky Creek isn’t what a real hardcore trail runner would call technical, but it’s about as technical as trails get around here - ditches, creeks, single track between trees with knotty roots, fallen trees across the creek, and loads of mud and up and down. It’s a serious leg workout compared to the flat, even trails we usually run. Imagine playing hopscotch for an hour straight and you’ve just about got it. Plus the trails are poorly marked and we always get lost and end up doing considerably more than 8k. I’m pretty sure the entire second mile we ran took place in some sort of alternate dimension - we ran back and forth checking the gps against the map, eventually struck out in a random direction on something that looked sort of like a trail but wasn’t, and only escaped because a big, pretty Shepherd dog bounced up to us and showed us the way to the right path! Possibly we were fairy led and the dog broke the spell. We never did see the dog’s owner, just heard him calling for his dog from deep in the woods somewhere.

Regardless the second mile was rootier and hillier than the real second mile, and by the time we were back on the right path we were already wiped. Not a good sign! We took longer and longer walk breaks, cursed the mud a lot, cursed the trail marking a lot, did not curse each other but exchanged some words about each other’s navigational skills (my husband used to be a Ranger Pathfinder. Ironic!) and got lost again but figured it out before going too far. We ran the home stretch hard and then realized we had emerged onto the parking lot from a different trail than the actual race trail. Retraced our steps until we figured out where we had gone wrong, thought about doing a second fast finish on the correct trail but decided the mud was really uncalled for and we would rather look at it than run through it since we still remembered it quite well from last year. We did do the creek jump - it’s a steep muddy downhill, then across the creek at the bottom, which is only about ankle deep but just too far for me to comfortably jump, then a steep muddy scramble up the other side.

My Achilles’ tendon started complaining about all the jumping up and down and over things two thirds of the way through, again not a good sign, and my husband was tripsy because his ankle was bugging him. Race day ought to be fun!

We saw a parade of huge whitetail deer, four of them in a row, evenly spaced, charging across the woods. We also saw a big red tailed hawk fly across the parking lot holding some sort of rodent in one talon. A nuthatch squirked at me, and we heard a solitary very cold frog. I’m also pretty sure I heard a snake go through the leaves across the trail in front of us.

Stanky is theoretically a dirt bike trail and we did see several dirt bikes, as well as two other fools like ourselves, out running practice for the Winter Series. Both looked somewhat lost and dazed.