Hit the Dusty Trail

Ran into work this morning.  Felt really good in spite of a lack of sleep last night.

The run home wasn't too bad.  Certainly was a nice day, clear, warm, couldn't ask for metter.  Starting to get psych'd about running the Logan Peak race this Saturday.

Did a short little run at lunch.  Pushed a little, but basically took it easy.

Ran to work this morning.  Had a 7am m eeting so I had to get up at 4:15 to catch an earlier train.  I kinda wish the train ride was longer so I could sleep while I'm on it.  Can't get much sleeping done in 15 minutes.

Ahhh, what a nice warm afternoon for a run home.  85 degrees was perfect for me.  Love the heat, bring it on.

Ran at lunch.  Pushed the pace some.  Think I'll go do some hill repeats after work.

Just a short little trail run.  Looking forward to tomorrow's race.

Ran the Logan Peak Trail Run today.  My time was within one minute of last year's time.  The top five runners blew the course record out of the water by 30 minutes.  Jon repeated his win of last year.  Perfect weather, clear skies, gorgeous views, beautiful flowers, and lots of snow still up on Logan Peak.  I'll update this with a race report later.

Ok, so here's the race report.  I ran this race last year and had a great time.  The course is beautiful, the volunteers are great, plenty of aid.  Overall just a great low key race. 

My race went about as well as I expected.  I didn't do any taper as I'm training for the Tahoe Rim 100 in three weeks and wanted to maintain the weekly mileage, so I didn't expect my time to be really good.  I just wanted to finish, feel good, and enjoy the day.  I managed to do all three.

The race starts in a park right next o Logan Dry Canyon and we got the privilege of running up that in the first 4.6 miles.  Roughly 3000' of gain.  At that point we hit the first aid station.  These people had to pakc everything in, including water.  One of the runners has some pack mules and used them to bring everything up the day before.  Then we turned and headed out on the south syncline trail.  At this point the trail leveld out some and basically was rolling for the next 7 miles.  The trail turned into a jeep road that took us around the back side of Logan Peak.  Here we came on to the second aid station, then headed up the road to the top of Logan Peak.  This isn't a particularly difficult climb other than the elevation.  The aid station is at 8100', and we climb to 9750' in the next 2.5 miles.  There wasn't as much snow this year as there was last, but the last 1/2 mile was snow covered.  I spent a coule minutes at the top just taking in the view.  The air was crystal clear and visibility was probably 100 miles.  Fantastic!  Why run road races when races like this exist.

After a couple of minutes, I headed back down.  The hard part of the race was over.  The rest of the race was downhill, kind of.  After I got back down to the aid station, I headed north along the north syncline trail.  This trail/jeep road did climb back up to about 9100', but I don't remember that climb being as hard his year.  The jeep road meets up with the Dry Canyon trail after about 1-2 miles and this trail took us back to the top of Dry Canyon.  This section of trail overlooks Logan Canyon and I had to stop a couple of times to avoid tripping while looking at the views.  Once back at the aid station at the top of Dry CAnyon, it's a 4.5 mile downhill run to the finish.  It's fun to just go bombing down this trail taking half the time to go down that it took going up.  I wasn't anywhere near doing the 5:30 pace that Jon was, but I did manage a sub 8:00 minute pace for most of it. 

I managed to cros the finish line within one minute of my time last year, 6:13 this year vs. 6:12 last year.  Last year I came in 14th place.  This year the competition was much stiffer and I only managed 39th place.  But you know, races like this are why I do ultras and trail races.  The venue, the volunteers, the low key of the race.  Not to mention that I got to hang out with a bunch of fellow ultrarunners that I know.  I figured that out of the 80 runners, I probably knew over half of them.  How cool is it that you can run a race with a bunch of people you know.

Anyway, a good time was had by all.  I definitely will be doing the race again next year, and if you're looking for a good first ultra or trail race, this one is a good one.