On Sunday, we planned to camp with some folks at Falls Lake, north of Raleigh. There is about a 35 mile section of NC's Mountains to Sea Trail up there, so I was salivating at the chance to run on it. I had Trish drop me off on the way to the campsite, south of Blue Jay Point. I had eaten a large lunch of Chilaquiles (bad idea) before the run, and was feeling that burning in my belly for the first hour and half. The first half of the trail was pretty up and down and twisty and technical, so I was jumping around and not moving real fast. about an hour and 45 in I got to the Shinleaf campground shower house and got some water and let go of the mexican food. Then I headed to a ranger station near highway 50. The place was closed, and there wasn't an accesible water source, which, from the map - looked like the only one for 10 miles or more. I snooped around and found a hose and filled up my bottles. I forgot to let the hose run for a while to get the scuzz out, so one of my bottles was undrinkably gross. Soon after, I got on to the "new" part of the trail, meaning there were hardly any decent maps of the place. The cool part was that the trail actually got into some really uninhabited areas, I didn't see any signs of human activity for quite a while, though I figured I was getting back to a road when I started seeing beer cans and McDonald's bags near the trail, and I guessed right. The trail started getting real messy after that. Large trees had fallen over the trail, which forced me to climb over and around stuff a lot, I wound up with a good collection of spider bites and ticks, and did a lot of crawling through poison ivy (we brought the Technu along). I got to another trailhead and realized that the next section was going to be impassable. There was actually a sign there that said just that. I finally threw in the towell and called Trish to come get me, then I ran down the highway until she showed up. I'm guessing from the maps I did see that I went about 24-25 miles, and it took me just at 4 hours. What a mess.
In other action:
I've been digging out old racing flats and xc shoes and doing some shoe surgery to try to make some good minimalist shoes to try to transition down from lightweight trainers to flats for some training. I think I'm too far gone to completely switch to running in H-streets, but I think it will be good for me to let my feet do what they want to a little more. We'll see how that goes.
