I had some hill training scheduled today and since the kids were at the Roy pool with cousins all afternoon I stopped by Striders to demo some trail shoes. Jon told me about the Tecnica Catch Me If You Can trail challenge East of Ogden so I decided to do that. How hard could it be to run 4.5 miles in 50 minutes anyways?
I got up to the trailhead on 27th street and took off. I immediately got lost by taking the South Taylor trail and decided to just jog the distance on that trail and go back and get more directions. It was also obvious that this was a very technical trail and very steep. When I got back down I picked up my son so he could hike the trail behind me, called Jon for better trail directions and hit it again. I went into oxygen debt in three minutes on that trail and couldn't believe how hard this kind of running was. Cool as heck! Near the halfway point of the trail it was all I could do to not walk, this thing was steep. I started catching my breath as I neared the top and realized more how to pace this kind of thing. I marked my location with their GPS and started down. I fell twice before it sunk in that you could not run as fast as you wanted to on this, but had to focus and control the hill. I also had to run on the side of the mountain a few times to get around scout groups hiking the trail. The demo shoes heated up pretty fast on me going down and I noticed my left toenail tearing off. The shoes were just too big probably even though they seemed to fit great at the start. I was pretty nervous about wrecking an ankle or something on this descent. I missed Corbin Tally's time by 31 seconds when I got down and I don't think I could have gone another 100 yards. 4.6 miles in 48:41. It beat the crap out of me.
Now to try it again a week.. | 