Slowly Getting Faster

This run is awesome!  I'm going to add one more section to this run and name it the Farmington Crown (because that is what the GPS tracking will look like when it's done, 3 points on a crown). 

I start on the firebreak road and go south toward davis creek trail.  I bypass the trailhead and go up around the back into pretty valley and up to Hell's Hole. Hell's Hole is beautiful by the way.  Pine forest single track trail within a few miles of my house. Then I cut back down to the davis creek trail and back to the firebreak.  

From there, I head north to the south flag rock trail and head up to flag rock.  When I complete this route I will head down the north side trail back to the firebreak, but there was too much snow on the north side still for me to run it today. I got about .1 of a mile down the north side trail before I turned around and went back the other way.  

Although this is as far as I got today, I think I will add a trip over to farmington canyon and up the Sunset trail to the sunset campground and back down either the canyon road or sunset trail to the firebreak.  Then cut across the firebreak back to my house.  If I take the canyon road back down I think this course will be about 16 miles and have around 5,000 feet of vertical gain. Pretty awesome to have this kind of trail access right out my front door! 

Raining tonight so I stuck to the treadmill. 2.25 warm up between 10:00 minute mile and 9:30 mile. Then 6 x 1/4 mile repeats (hot and cold) @ 6:40 pace. I tried one at 6:00 pace but it was a bit too fast and I had to slow it back down to 6:40. After the repeats I upped the elevation to 7% for 1 mile and 8% for 1/2 mile @ 10:00 pace. Then 1/2 mile cool down. Total of 7 miles at 64:00.

I wanted to get closer to 7 miles tonight, but I also wanted to explore the Hornet Canyon trail.  I've heard that there is a connector trail that goes from Steed Creek/Hornet Canyon over to Flag Rock and I really wanted to find out if it was true.  Turns out it is, although the connector from Hornet Canyon to Flag Rock is not very well groomed at the moment.  It is clear that the Farmington trail crew has been putting in the work up there. All in all a good run.  Maybe something to tack on to the Farmington Crown run in some way. 

I found the Farmington Spine trail, so I took it up the mountain.  First, I went up and over Flag Rock from South to North. North side trail still has some snow on it but it's mostly clear now.  Then I planned on going up Farmington Canyon but discovered the trail head for the farmington Spine and took that up to the junction for the pipeline trail instead.  It's a decent trail, at least as far as I took it. The first .5 mile is pretty undefined, but after that it's pretty clear where it goes and it isn't even too steep. If I had time, I would have liked to take the pipeline trail for a while and see where it goes and how clear it is. Oh well, another day.