My hips hurt.  This is what I felt like after 20 miles at Killington but am only at mile 10.  I can barely see the trail.  Should I flag someone down at the next road?  Maybe I’ll pass someone on the trail who has a car at a trailhead.  Why didn’t I bring that headlamp?  Why did my phone die so quickly?  I have 1% battery left – better shut down the screen. Why is this run so hard?  Am I not recovered yet or is it the electrolytes I forgot to bring?  Have an hour left.  Better pay attention to the trail or I will fall. Man am I hungry.  What will I do if I get stuck out here in the dark and cold? Listen for traffic.  I have no way to call for help. I can’t believe my phone is still working…take a left here…

And about an hour later, I finally saw the yurt and trailhead where my car was.  What a relief!

 

 

This was my first long run since the Killington Ultra (race + 3 weeks).  Today I did 17.1 miles over 4:21 hours.  This was a busy day with a late running start:

• Had a bee in my pants.  Picked dahlias and brought one inside my pajamas
• I accidentally jammed my toothbrush up my nose (and it hurt)

• Kenny left at 3:15am to go on a diving vacation in Roatan, Honduras without me on our anniversary (darn work!)
• I got my new Suburu Crosstrek
• Had to do 4.5 hours on flatter trails to simulate more the Stone Cat 50k I’m training for on Nov 2. I wanted to run the Beaver Brook trails and see if I could connect them with the conservation land trails to get up to Silver Lake area.  Alltrails app rocks!

Lessons Learned:

• Always bring a headlamp.  Always also take it from the car and put in hydration pack.  and backup batteries and light stick.
• Always bring an extra phone charger.  Phone went from 95% to 0% over 4 hours even in airplane mode just using screen with Alltrails.
• don’t forget electrolytes.  I could barely move later.  I forgot salt stix tabs so figured this was a good day to experiment with 50% less than planned…. NOT!
• Listen to my coach.  I went way faster than he asked me to and was mostly in Z3 vs. Z2 despite good intentions.

As always, love the variety of environments you run through on the trails.  Not many people out today despite heading into peak foliage season.  Started out at Beaver Brook crossing Proctor Hill Rd to get to the Beaver Brook Pond:

 

 

I took a lesser trail to get north, which was at times a little hard to find.  Came back on a larger parallel one starting from the more west trailhead (two are very close together on Rocky Pond Rd – one has more space to park) that I would recommend.

Then ran past Rocky Pond Rd to get to the Big Hill and Silver Lake area – this started out with a debris strewn path before turning into a soft pine trail – also had some very narrow single track trail:

 

 

Then you came out into the big farmfields and the Noreaster trails – all the pumpkins had been harvested earlier in the week and the fields mowed which had a ton of tall weeds (similar to Killington) lying on ground to run through:

And the beautiful 2.5 mile Silver lake trail (2 miles without the run to the primary sign from the parking lot):

I was pretty crippled at the end and could literally barely walk later on.  Good thing I had my handy vibrator and my neighbor Marguery/Richard to feed me dinner and give me a warm blanket!