Story
My original plan for today was to start with a sub 5:02 Sweet 1600 to take the lead in the Challenge from Patrick Milano before taking on the Tough Trail Challenge. After striking out this morning at the Cornell, Barton, and IHS tracks, I headed home to regroup. Post choosing the Dryden track due to the more favorable bus schedule, I saw that Patrick had picked up several points by rerunning Cayuga Cliffs. For the Sweet 1600, I broke out my track spikes as—between my Challenge runs last week, the Charleston Distance Run (and a wedding) on Saturday, and a Lakefront Loops 5K yesterday right after an 8 hour drive—I needed all the help I could get. Given Patrick’s improved time, my 4:54 was not enough to take the lead. This left a decision: should I redo Cayuga Cliffs or Triple Hump? Since I really didn’t want to run Triple Hump after Saturday’s 15 mile road race, I settled on Cayuga Cliffs.
After busing to Lansing Town Hall, I biked to the Sims-Jennings Preserve (and lost all tension in my front derailleur right before I got there). Since the course is relatively rock- and root-free, I brought along my XC spikes. (This is probably the first time I’ve run in both track and XC spikes in the same day.) After some stretching and strides, I headed out blasting down the hill knowing that I needed to run 30:55 to take the lead in the Challenge from Patrick. After passing Gillian Haines-Sharp at the first intersection, I continued flying down the hill en route to a 5:29 first mile. After the grueling climb, I hit mile 2 in the meadow in 7:56 and knew that I was in great shape to hit my goal. I continued to push hard through the remainder of the course. After passing Cecelia Madsen in the final meadow, I finished in 28:18—thereby smashing my goal, beating Patrick’s time by exactly 3 minutes, and beating my previous time by just over 4 minutes. By picking up about a dozen points, I was able to take the (hopefully insurmountable) lead in the Challenge. Afterwards I biked to the mall and then bused to campus to take on Fall Creek Trails and Mulholland Waterfalls again. At this point, I threw in the towel on the Tough Trails Challenge as it was clear that I had neither the time nor the energy to finish (or fix my bike). Overall, I had a fun and successful 15 days of the Challenge.
(While someone—who will remain nameless on the forum—insisted that I could have used my Twilight 5K time for the Challenge, I did not as that seemed like cheating given that it was more than two months before I signed up for the Challenge…and it’s supposed to be a challenge after all.)