19 and counting
I don't like the post I wrote yesterday, it sounds inflated and artificial.
I tried to run Northshore last Thursday after a day or so of rain but was turned away at the gate because the trail is closed for at least 2 days after any significant rain, so I drove the nearly hour to Erwin park hoping to still get some decent running in before sunset. Mildly frustrated at spending over an hour and a half in the car, I ended up getting about 37 minutes of running at Erwin in what was also some fairly wet terrain and learned that I need to find the headlamps I know we have stashed away somewhere so that I don't have to call it quits right at sundown.
We had discussed going to Northshore on Saturday for a recreational walk/hike without the dogs, but ended up taking care of some errands and such so I decided to get up early Sunday morning to get in an hour and a half or so before the house woke up. Sunrise was at about 740 and I ended up pulling into the parking lot right about 8.
The group of 4 or 5 women and the "token male" companion as they called him were friendly with some basic advice on the west end of the trail since I seem to be working my way east to west with each visit, but I found out that I ended up failing to follow the trail completely to it's end since it requires some navigation through the twin coves park, which I thought I did, but just not enough.
I gave up for the time being on using the CU pack with the bladder and just stuffing a water bottle in the bladder pocket and this has worked somewhat well for a couple of runs, but once my shirt got heavy with sweat and I took it off, it only took 20 minutes for the pack to rub a raw spot on my lower back. I'm about to the point where hydrating pre-run and carrying a couple gels (or not for runs 1-2 hours) may end up being my preferred set up. I simply don't have the patience for running with unnecessary gear and I don't know if it was taking off my pack and dropping it off at my car at the 60 min mark or the fact that it just took my legs that long to get the rhythm but from 60 minutes to 90 minutes I felt better than I did at all during the first hour.
Of course I had my obligatory right ankle roll which took somewhere in the nature of 20 minutes to stop throbbing and I even managed to soak my right foot in the creek for about a minute on the way back which felt great but reminded me that I need to do some more Krupicka-like modifications, specifically taking out any stuffing in the tongue.
I'm also still unsure of just how long to anticipate a full running of the trail on race day since I'm still in the exploring stage and took no less than 4 rabbit trails yesterday as well as two turn-arounds on the later half hour. While I am getting a fairly good idea of the general layout of the area, there's some new single-track that I'm not sure will be part of the course and that would add a bit of distance. Though all said and done, and after looking at last year's results a couple more times, I still think a time of about 3:00 is reasonable, though I should be focused on just finishing and not set myself up for a disappointment like the Open just 2 weeks ago.
Finally, while it always hurts at first, I managed to make it through the initial rubbing of my heel as with all new pairs of shoes and the right shoe shows significant signs of the resulting blood even though, as I mentioned earlier, I soaked the shoe in the creek on the return trip. I'm not sure of the significance, but there seems to be some correlation between the rubbing of my heel and running immediately after rolling my ankle, I don't remember much pain if any once I got my stride back and the heel rubbing is much worse on the right than the left.
The rain's been falling now for at least 18 hours which means it will be Thursday at best before I can make it back out there, but that should be just about perfect to see about making it all the way to the far west end and back again towards the east a bit, assuming I'll have to park at the MADD shelter again, maybe I'll get in some more track work this week after a successful session of descending intervals last week (400, 2x200, 4x100, repeat) and I've been trying to figure out the best way to get over to the hill in Little Elm on the original bike route without having to do 20 miles total round trip or else having to ride my bike over there first. From measuring it out on the map it looks like I can cut through smotherman and be on 423 for a few hundred yards and cut the distance to the hill to about 3.5 miles each way, which if I then did 2 laps of the hill stretch at a mile each way (4 miles total) that'd be an 11 mile total, but I'll just have to see how it works out when I have more time.
Better, still not completely happy with it,
Ryan
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