![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Some of my friends from runclub suggested I try a trail race! There's a whole series of these, run by this D.IN.O. group: Do INdiana Off-road.
So I got up early this morning and drove over to Brown County State Park for the race! It was cool and raining lightly. It took me a minute to get from the park entrance where GMaps took me to the entrance where the race actually started: it's a big park!
But I showed up with ample time to get my race number, mill around, drink my coffee. Some people were trying to stay dry, but I figured we were going to get pretty wet during the run, so I wandered around and tried to find people I knew. Before too long, I found Barry (the runclub friend primarily responsible for getting me to sign up) and also Steph, Rachel, Chris N, and some other folks from the club.
And then we were off! The race started in a grassy field, but then immediately went onto trails and into some deep, slippery mud. Somebody lost a shoe in it! And almost the entire course was either on a steep uphill or a steep downhill.
For a while, I tried to stick with Barry and Chris N -- Barry seemed especially gung-ho about the race, kind of aggressive, really! But I really wasn't sure how I'd hold up on the trails (pretty sure I hadn't done a trail race since high school!), so I backed off after a few miles and let them go. Also I made the mistake of bringing my glasses -- they were too wet to see through, so I wore them on top of my head and had to keep making sure that tree branches didn't knock them off.
But I kept up a pretty good pace, and had a really pleasant time in the forest with the gentle rain and the mud and the trees and big hills. It was kind of like the trails in Tallahassee, but steeper, which seems weird if you think of Indiana as the midwest, but maybe less weird if you think about how we're right next to Kentucky...
Complete results! (for some reason, it says June 1, but that's wrong -- it was July 6.) 1:20:38, for roughly 8-minute miles over mud and steep hills and rocks and etc! The race directors said it was really more like 10 miles than 15K, so I'll go with that.
I should do more trail races; that was fun.
So I got up early this morning and drove over to Brown County State Park for the race! It was cool and raining lightly. It took me a minute to get from the park entrance where GMaps took me to the entrance where the race actually started: it's a big park!
But I showed up with ample time to get my race number, mill around, drink my coffee. Some people were trying to stay dry, but I figured we were going to get pretty wet during the run, so I wandered around and tried to find people I knew. Before too long, I found Barry (the runclub friend primarily responsible for getting me to sign up) and also Steph, Rachel, Chris N, and some other folks from the club.
And then we were off! The race started in a grassy field, but then immediately went onto trails and into some deep, slippery mud. Somebody lost a shoe in it! And almost the entire course was either on a steep uphill or a steep downhill.
For a while, I tried to stick with Barry and Chris N -- Barry seemed especially gung-ho about the race, kind of aggressive, really! But I really wasn't sure how I'd hold up on the trails (pretty sure I hadn't done a trail race since high school!), so I backed off after a few miles and let them go. Also I made the mistake of bringing my glasses -- they were too wet to see through, so I wore them on top of my head and had to keep making sure that tree branches didn't knock them off.
But I kept up a pretty good pace, and had a really pleasant time in the forest with the gentle rain and the mud and the trees and big hills. It was kind of like the trails in Tallahassee, but steeper, which seems weird if you think of Indiana as the midwest, but maybe less weird if you think about how we're right next to Kentucky...
Complete results! (for some reason, it says June 1, but that's wrong -- it was July 6.) 1:20:38, for roughly 8-minute miles over mud and steep hills and rocks and etc! The race directors said it was really more like 10 miles than 15K, so I'll go with that.
I should do more trail races; that was fun.
