When the alarm went off at 4:30, I had little negative self talk: 'And why am I doing this?". We got out the door at 5:30 and it was raining (yes, this is the desert). We had a 1 hour+ drive to Colossal Cave Mountain Park. The Arizona Trail is sorta like the Applachian Trail and we were going race on 8 miles of it including about 1500 feet of climbing.
This trail running is to road racing like mountain biking is to road riding. I clearly lack the technical skills to accel and there are some darn serious people doing this stuff! It would have been easy to be cocky as they limited the field to 250 because the venue could not handle any more. We found it was a pretty select group.
I would compare the 8 mile run to the Houston Half Marathon(in degree of difficulty) and, of course, we were not rested at all. We executed the plan to train right through this and pulled off 3 pretty hard days prior to this morning.
I fell at mile 6 and got all scraped up. I realize now that lots of people fall...kinda like mountain bike racing. Teenie came in 4th at 1:19 and change and I got 3rd at 1:14:17. I got a cool Mexican Tile Trophy.
We are headed to the Spa for massages so I will sign off.
4 comments:
You two are tough. Great racing out there. Looks like a cool place to mtb.
Moutain biking is tremendous out here.
Wait a minute! Is that 3rd and 4th overall, or is that age group? Either way, it's awesome, but if you mean overall, then that's incredible! Is Joe F out there doing this with you...you must be making him proud.
Oh. It was AG. There were track adn cross country runners from AZU and AZ State there. Have not seen Joe yet. He is out of town. Back soon.
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