Philosopher's Way 7K Trail Race Report

Woo hoo! I ran a trail race! It was only my second ever trail run - and it was fantastic!! I have no idea what my "official" time was but my watch said 1:00 flat. (I didn't stop my watch at the water station or when I took pictures. Donna did stop hers so her watch says we managed 58:11. The official time is sure to be a bit more than an hour because it wasn't chip timed and it took us a bit to get to the line.) What a great race! And what super weather we had. Overcast and only in the upper 70's. Here are some pictures from the morning:

This is the 15K start. (We didn't do the 15K because aside from seeming like too much to bite off for a first trail race - we still have a 2100 yd swim and a 25 mile bike ride on the schedule for today.)

We were running on the mountain bike trails in the Carolina North forest so there were all kinds of coolie things along the way like this banked ramp.

They had PBR and pretzels at the water station. I LOVE trail races!!

Here we are at the water break. I carried my camera in my hand the whole time - so you can tell I wasn't terribly concerned with my time. I wanted to enjoy the experience and record what was different about trail racing from road racing.

Pretty much everything was different! There were rolling hills throughout. A few tougher climbs but mostly rolling, rolling, and winding. The above picture doesn't really do justice to this cute little curvy bump and tree bridge along the trail. I was fascinated by how different it feels to be in the forest. I got into a zone but it was an entirely different type of zone. For the first mile, we could hear the music from the "expo" area drifting over and through the trees. After that faded away, we heard each other - a little chatter, some huffing and puffing along the single track line, and the crunch and tramp of footfalls.

There was an entire glade of ferns at the bottom of one of the downhill curves. I love the lush mystery of ferns.

And rocks!! There were gorgeous rocks everywhere. Rocks make me happy. Seriously happy. At the start, we had chatted with a teacher Donna used to work with (Kirsten) and met some of her friends (Kristy and Blake) who were doing the race. Afterwards we compared notes about how great the race was and we might start our own training group! (Maybe even to include our dogs in some way.) How much fun is that?! This training and racing thing just keeps getting better and better! Peace.

TODAY LOVE: Mother Nature and the athletic community

**Hey RBR - look! I posted a race report on the very day I ran the race!!**