Trail Diary 10.23.10: Kingston RailTrail, or, Getting Ready for Stone Cat

Nothing especially gnarly about this trail.  Very nice rail trail, as rail trails go.  Flat. Nice surface.  Wickedly runnable.  Ran it with my friend Jack, who I met at the Monster Marathon (his first marathon--baptism by fire!) and who just ran his first 50K last weekend.  All this after running his first half-marathon this past spring.  See Jack Run.  Run Jack.  Jack Can Run.  Nice Running Jack.  Ok, I'm done with that now.  But Jack can run, that's for sure.

Started out south from Leggett Rd. trailhead.  I'd never run that part, and Jack had done a bit.  Quickly became, umm, "underutilized."  But we managed over three miles (per Jack's Garmin) before turning around.  So about 6 miles back up to Leggett Rd, a nice warmup.  The section north towards Kingston has a great running surface, and is very nicely wooded for most of the route.  A perfect, cool fall day.  We imperceptibly picked it up, and were bombing along, until Jack looked at the Garmin and said "Uh, we're running about 7:30 pace."  Like!  We dialed it back, but before we knew it, were steaming again.  Think we ran much of that ~6 mile leg at sub-8 minute pace.  May sound pitiful to you, but it's hammering for me, and pretty impressive for a guy 7 days removed from his first 50K.  May not be singletrack, but it grooved, and it flowed, and it was really fun.

So we wound up with 18 by the time we got back to the car.  That was a perfect tune-up run for me, two weeks prior to the highly-runnable Stone Cat course.  Nice to see I can still run, and not just do the "ultra shuffle."  New orthotics and a good arch taping job prior to the run today and I had no problems.  About 8:30 pm as I write this and, so far, so good on the injury front (or it might be the IPA "anti-inflammatory" kicking in).

Cat!  Cat!  Cat!  Cat!  Cat!  Cat!  Cat!  Cat!  Cat!  Cat!