With not quite twenty-four hours gone by since I crossed the finish line of a ten klick trail race on Sunday morning I thought I’d feel a little worse than I actually do.
I’m not usually a trail runner, if only because every trail race I’ve ever done has resulted in a minor but side-lining injury. Pondering this thought on Saturday evening, the organizers having sent a caution email about the slipperiness of the trail conditions due to the light thaw we’ve been experiencing, I barely slept the night prior to the race. Instead, tossing and turning, getting my anxiety all twisted around the gap in my memory between where I heard “trail race” and still signed up to participate.
The three hundred or so runners were split between the 25 klick distance and the 10 klick… the latter of which was well good enough for me. That ten klicks still took a solid hour and a half, and Pica, who was on sweep duty landed back at the finish at roughly the three hour mark. It was a tough race.
I tried strapping the new GoPro to my chest using the chest harness. That was a mixed bag. Good, because I definitely needed both hands to clamber up and over various obstacles. Bad, because I remembered too late that my chest is far-from-stable when I run, swaying back and forth. I caught about 40 minutes of footage and boiled it down to a watchable 14:
I woke up on Monday morning feeling a lot better than I thought I would. I’m still not totally convinced about the trail running appeal, but they collected a lot of frozen turkeys for the food bank, so it ranks pretty high on the good cause-o-meter. For the next little while though, I might just stick with the asphalt.
Turkeys, Ho!
The GoPro followed along for the race. Twenty-five minutes of footage shrunk down a bit to provide a glimpse of the race atmosphere.