Trailrunner888.wordpress.com Website Review

This photo was taken after the 3rd (of 10?) trail races from the Knoxville Track Club’s Tredden Trodden Trail Race Series. This run was a tuff 8.5 miler that weaved in & out of every applicable inch of Concord Park. “The Trail That Can’t be Concord” was a morning run & my heart rate was max’d in the 190’s throughout the entire course. Yes, it Jarrad & I have found ourselves in the midst of East Tennessee’s running season. Altogether, we’ve probably amas*ed close to 1000 miles over the past year –everything from exhilarating winter snow runs de*p along the AT to the heavy pavement pounding of the Covenant Kungfu brother Jarrad & I almost met our makers yesterday. Scary sh*t along the AT. It was his turn to find a trail for our typical Sunday The planned run was basically a couple offshoots of a section of the AT that looked promising. The drive took us forever, but about 1:30 we finally pulled up to the trailhead and set out for a 12 miler! He’d broken the run plan into 3 legs: a 5.8 beginning, then a 2.7 mile sprint, and ending with a 3.7 stretch. We didn’t know what was uphill or downhill, just the connectors and how they eventually formed a big loop back to our starting point.  Halfway through the first leg, Jarrad and his surgically repaired ACL slipped on a wet rock and took an ugly spill into one of the 5 big streams we had to figure our way across. The sky had been spitting little flurries all day, but around the time of his slip, the weather opened up a bit and it really started snowing, billowing a flurry of fat snowflakes down that continued throughout the entire 2nd half of the trailrun. The harsher weather rolled in and began covering any sign of trail we had to go on. For me, that’s when the first real pangs of panic started to creep in. We couldn’t turn back because that would mean trying to cross the wide streams again and, on paper, it would be a slightly shorter trip back to the car if we pushed onward.