Bam - Off we rumble and in typical fashion, I go out way too fast. This being my longest trail race to run yet (9 miler last year), damn the torpedoes.....Finally check my garmin at the mile1 beep and oh no, 6:40 so I rationalize, it's been downhill.... Then at the 3 mile, all I can think is "it's only 4-5k's" so am I going to pay for this later because the first 3 miles is the easy part.
At the first aid station, I grab some powerbeads (cause that's what the aid station lady said) which was just a bead necklace, but hey, when in Rome so I wrapped one around my right hand. Amazing how the mind works, when I got to a dark place, the mind started thinking about these beads.
After we ditched the service road and hit the trails, I finally found my groove of mixing up the cadence, engaging the mind, etc. Turn, climb, lean forward and short cadence, descend, weight back, light on the feet, stretch out the legs, turn, rinse and repeat. At the mile 6 beeper, hey, #2 5k done.
Hit a dark spot around mile 10 as I was now in no-mans land and cresting a climb, do I walk, do I push, do I let the HR get jacked, well before I knew it, was at the top, crested and recovered on the downhill. Unfortunately what put me there was at 9.5, thinking it's only 2 miles to go, it's time to open it up, I did, for about 2 minutes, then realized, 2 miles is a long way to go, not like a quarter mile to the finish.... oops so Mile 10 was a lot harder than it needed to be. Not knowing the course, I had no clue how far we really had left but was jacked to see the parking lot and know the finish line was close.

Grabbed water, hung around, chatted with Chris, James, Fatty, Browndog, fender, had a little grub, won some moon pies then headed out.


Well run race, awesome swag bag and the course is wide open, not technical but challenging with the climbs so you can run your own race instead of the singletrack bottlenecks. Fantastic sponsor support tents and hot food served after, what a deal!