Windy 10 on the Trails

This week the weather had decided to turn. First it became really cold, as in when I left from work on Thursday morning there was at least an inch of ice on my windows. Then it rained, and now it is windy and rainy here and there. So with all this weather today's run was going to be interesting because who knew what we were in for. For all we knew it was going to be a swim.

Today the Fleet Feet Ultra Training group met at Cavitt and headed out to Los Lagos roughly round trip 10 miles. When I arrived everyone was still in their cars. It was cold, the wind was howling and it was lightly raining. Captain Kirk was out marking the last little bit of the trail so I chit chatted with Wonder Woman and soon enough everyone in the group slowly showed up. Their was roughly 40 of us out on the trail this morning. That is a huge group. Captain Kirk took the lead, Wonder Woman stayed in the middle along with Coach Nikon.

The group started off and I was up front, which last year I was in the back. It was a nice change for me. I haven't been back on this trail since September, and I had forgotten how much I hate the fire road leading out of Cavitt. It is fine heading out but on the way back in it just feels like it takes forever.

The fire road was really windy, so windy at times it stopped me in mid stride but once I reached the single track things calmed down and became muddy. There was a ton of slipping and sliding but luckily I stayed on my feet. The trails today were muddy and had a ton of puddles. At first I was running around the puddles but I soon found myself running through them.

I had a lot of interesting thoughts running through my head, I was singing Christmas songs one second and the next second I was cursing myself for carrying a bottle instead of my using my pack and then the next second I would be thinking about work. Probably a good thing this run was only 10 miles. Who knows what else would have gone through my head. But I did enjoy running in the puddles and mud and the trail felt so much better then the road.

As I neared the turn around point Captain Kirk was there waiting, I didn't stick around too long as I didn't want to get to cold. I turned it and headed back. On my return it looked like everyone was having a good time with smiles on their faces and mud on their legs. I ran the return by myself and just kept a nice and steady pace. Once I hit the fire road though the wind really slowed any forward progress. It just howled and blew fiercely the entire time. It was slow but I made it back to the cars and I quickly changed out of my wet clothes and shoes and into some warm dry clothes and waited for the rest of the group to get in.

It was a good run I stayed within myself and didn't get caught up in going out to hard. It can be hard to do that as running in a group the competitiveness comes out in me, but I kept it in check today. Can't wait for more great runs like this on the trails in the weeks to come, just maybe a little less wind. Keep on running everyone!!!