A couple months ago, a member of the Wasatch Mountain Wranglers Facebook group posted that they needed a runner to add to their team for the Zion Ragnar Trail Relay. The fee was already paid, just come and run. My family was scheduled to be out of town on the race weekend, so I figured that I had nothing better to do and secured a spot on the team. I hadn’t done a Ragnar before and from what I knew,…
I grew up in Bellingham, WA and spent a lot of time hiking and mountain biking in the AMAZING sets of trails in the Chuckanut Mountains that creep into town from the south and east. These trails are amazing. The Galbraith (Lookout Mountain) trail system is world famous for Mtn. Biking trails. I spent so much time up there as a teenager, but didn’t realize how good I had it until I moved away. I never ran those trails though. …
In October I had a conference to attend down in Tucson, so I decided to drive. My plan was to find a place to run somewhere in the middle of the drive and I chose an obscure canyon that gets easy access to the Colorado River. It is Soap Creek Canyon, south of the 89a and the Vermillion Cliffs. The night before I couldn’t sleep so I just hit the road around 3:30 AM – arriving at the trail-head around…
For October I gave my knee time to recover, but didn’t really do much to fix it. I should have stretched it lots, but didn’t. Then we decided to run a Thanksgiving Morning 5 mile turkey trot. I did a run each of the 2 weeks prior (5 miles at 9:02 min/mile, and 4.7 at 9:44 min/mile), and the knee gave me trouble each time. Stretching mid-run helped, but it still hurt. Race day was cold and windy. To make…
The planned 5k race was 29 September 2012, so I decided to give my knees a break and only do bike rides for the month. 7 days out, I went out for a 1 mile jog. Knee felt fine, but I didn’t want to push it. The race was early on a Saturday morning. At the fire of a cannon I took off, adrenalin pumping and pushing me to run faster that I ever had before. I posted a PR…