I have been a very quiet blogger as of late, not that I haven't had anything to write about because this has been an awesome year with many great runs with friends and a few races that have taken me way out of my comfort zone with distances I never thought I would or could run. I'm going to try again to do a better job of keeping up with my thoughts as they happen even though I like to go back and revisit the fun runs and races that happen weeks or months before.
This year started out with the Dirty Kiln trail half marathon and the Hyner Challenge a 25k trail race in April, with the Laurel Highlands 50k trail race and Eager Seeger trail half marathon in June, the Megatransect 28 mile trail race in September and the big finish of the Stone Mill 50 trail race in November. I know that's not a lot of races but with my work schedule (which I only have 1 weekend off a month) it makes it very difficult to schedule races. Also I ran in the One Run for Boston and a group of us ran the Lost Turkey Trail (28 miles) not races but a lot of fun!
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| Laurel Highlands 50k |
As I said earlier in this blog this year I have run distances that I never thought I could run, but after the Hyner 25k I thought I would take a shot at a 50k. Training was going really well (no injuries) and friends were doing Laurel Highlands 70.5 mile Race. The Laurel Highlands also had a 50k option and it wasn't sold out so I decided to make a go of it. When I stepped up to the line I really didn't know what to expect, I knew the distance was double the Hyner Challenge distance and a lot of elevation gain so I didn't know how I would do. I felt really good most of the race till about mile 29 and I struggled the last 3 miles but still had a time of 5:48:45 which was good enough for 4th overall. I was ecstatic and hooked on doing ultra marathons. So I signed up for Stone Mill 50, a 50 mile trail race in Gaithersburg MD. I was quite concerned about running 50 miles because that was way out of my comfort zone and really not even a thought of running a distance like that in the beginning of the year. So, here I am a week after the Stone Mill 50 and trying to find new races for next year. I'm going to go into more details on Stone Mill in my next blog so for now I'll say thanks for reading and get outside and enjoy the beautiful outdoors!!
