Trail running was more fun that I expected. It was also less about sightseeing than I thought. I was talking to a friend of mine last week about the upcoming run and he said, “trail running is fun but I never get to see anything but the ground because I fall every time I look up”. I felt bad for the clumsy fellow until I got about 50 yards in from the trailhead. And then I laughed because I’d apparently signed up for 8 miles of staring at the feet of the runner in front of me to see where they were stepping to avoid roots and rocks.

This video is a good illustration of the trail as we ran it (and the stabilized video minimizes some of the motion-sickening I get from these GoPro jams):

As I was looking around at the other runners before the start I set a goal of not-being-last. I was happy to see that I was neither last in my gender nor in my age group. I was close to the bottom, but not on the bottom. I’m also still kind of sore two days later. 8 miles was my longest distance run *and* it was my first trail run so that combo is probably (hopefully?) what’s got me still creaking around. I’ll know tomorrow when I get back to mid-week normalcy.