The glorious fall weather over the last week made for a lot of FLRC Challenge fun, with Aaron King completing the FLRC 100K Ultra Challenge on November 7th and setting new running time and elapsed time records! Be sure to read his write-up of what it’s like to run all 10 courses in one day. And although we don’t know what happened yet, Damian Clemons attempted the Ultra Challenge but finished only nine of ten courses yesterday—everything but Pseudo Skunk Cabbage.
Not everyone feels the need to run all the courses in a single 24-hour day. Congratulations to Aaron Proujansky and Jules Johnson, who used a more methodical approach to complete their Challenges this week. Aaron warmed up with some of the shorter courses earlier in the year and then focused on the rest this fall, whereas Jules started in mid-October and took a one-and-done approach to check off each course over the course of a month.
If you, like me, are missing the Pseudo Skunk Cabbage half marathon course to complete your Challenge, let me encourage you to attend Heather Cobb’s group run this Saturday morning at 8:30 AM. I’d be there, but I strained a calf in the final PGXC race last Sunday so I hope to organize another informal attempt on Pseudo Skunk before the end of the year.
Thanks to the example set by Jules, it’s clear that it’s possible to run all ten courses in a month, and we have six weeks left. Plenty of time to finish! We’re especially rooting for Rebecca Lambert since she recently posted her first effort on the leaderboard (a Black Diamond Trail, so she can clearly cover the longer courses).
It seems that the Challenge is making some people a little punchy. First, Pete Kresock set a new single-course repetition record by running the East Hill Rec Way downhill mile a whopping 15 times. Since that course requires running back up before starting again, Pete did a 30-mile day, all in the service of his private goal of running a continuous marathon or longer on all ten courses by year’s end. And then, in a bit of wonderfully chronological lunacy, Karen Ingall and Mickie Sanders-Jauquet took advantage of the 11/11 date to run 11 repetitions of the East Hill Rec Way, making for an impressive 22-mile day.
Finally, we’d really appreciate it if you could take a couple of minutes to complete the FLRC Challenge survey, even if you’re just following along with the Challenge as a spectator. Your answers will help us decide whether to put on the FLRC Challenge again next year and if so, how long it should be, which courses we should include, and what changes could make it more fun for even more runners.
Until next week, keep logging those miles!
