Pisgah Mountain 23k Trail Race

I haven't written a blog post in a long time and I have not raced in a long time.  I have been IN some races since "breaking myself" back in March, but for the most part they were all medium efforts...get though the race without hurting myself etc. 

The last two years I have run the 50k at the Pisgah Mountain Trail Races and I have enjoyed the race, so this year I found myself finally getting back into shape and thought I would head up to Chesterfield, NH and give the shorter 23k race a go. 

When I first thought about this, I was thinking of going there and just running very conservative and enjoy the trails...but as the race got closer and I finally got in one run over 10 miles, I thought what the hell, I will go out there and give it a go.

So on my 30 mile or so weeks and one long run...I took Jonny Hammett's bait at the start of the race as he flew down Old Chesterfield Road at sub 6 min pace, however as soon as we hit the first climb I knew I would not be able to run side by side with Jonny on this day and that was OK.

When we finally reached the trail, I found myself in third place in the 23k and ran there, alone, for most of the race.

I pushed hard throughout...getting up the grueling ups as well as I could and taking advantage of the flat sections and the downs that weren't too wet and slippery.  There was a pretty good amount of water and mud out on the course, we were told that the area received about 5" of rain on Thursday.  There were even some bees on course to give us a little sting if we didn't move quickly enough.

I thought before the race that I could run around 1:45 and in the end I finished with a 1:45:38, pretty good guess considering I have never run that course before!

I ended up finishing in 4th place, getting passed with about 3 miles to go for the 3rd position.  I picked up some Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies with pecans and cranberries for my effort.

Turtle teammate Patrick Quinn took his first shot at Pisgah and finished well in 2:00:27 and another Turtle, John Peabody ran the 50k again and finished 3 mins faster than 2012 in 6:55:20.  See FULL RESULTS!

Post race TNT fun was had at the Gardner Ale House in Gardner, MA

Belgian Triple

Now that Pisgah is over, I look forward to being able to get in some higher mileage weeks so I can start racing at the level I was in the Winter and Spring...next up is the 5th race in the NE Runner Pub Series, a 5k in Cambridge, I don't have a clue what to expect in a road 5k right now...but I guess we will soon find out!