Oktoberfest

Congrats to all who ran in the Craig Cup race this morning! After last week's 3 short races in 2 days I decided a long run was in order.

Due to family plans later in the day I decided to get an early start on a 4-hour run today at Bradbury. Phil showed up precisely at 6am and we were off into the darkness. The combination of the blanket of freshly fallen leaves on the ground and the complete lack of natural light meant that the trail was pretty hard to follow. About 15 minutes into the run I realized that Phil and I were running in circles on the Lanzo trail, and it took about 10 minutes before I could get us out! I'm really glad that it will be daylight during the Bruiser. Once the sun came up it was easy to follow the trail and despite all the rain we had yesterday the trails were in good shape and not too soggy.

Because of the time we wasted early on in the run we didn't have time to run the complete Bruiser course before getting back to the parking lot at 8am to pick up any new arrivals. So we skipped the "O-Trail" and got back to our cars at 7:50, just enough time for a quick trip to the summit. The view from the top of Bradbury was worth the effort it took to get up there, equally as breathtaking as the steep ascent.

For the second half of my run I thought I'd start where I left off on the Bruiser course, checking out the "O-Trail" to see how hard it would be to follow the most gnarly trail in the park now that it was covered with leaves. Generally the trail was in pretty good shape and not too difficult to follow, but about halfway through I got sucked into some type of mobius strip of a trail that I just couldn't get out of. I started out in a clockwise direction and before I knew it I was covering the same ground running in the opposite direction. This happened at least twice before I eventually sat down and scrawled out a Euclidean equation in the dirt and calculated where the trail was supposed to go. By the time I got out of the "O-Trail" I still had well over an hour to run but my legs were getting tired from all the math. I did manage to get in 4 hours but came away from it feeling pretty wiped out.

Following my run I met Randy, an enthusiastic runner who has signed up for the Bruiser but is pretty new to trail running. Hopefully he'll join us for some of our regular runs soon.

Later in the day I got together with a large contingent of family members for our annual pumpkin carving festivities. This year I had running on my mind...