Sunday, October 10, 2010

Preview

     Jim and I went out to take a look at the part of the JFK 50 course that's run on the Appalachian Trail. Wow. It was an eye-opener for an Indiana boy. The race starts in Boonsboro, Maryland and you run the first few miles on a highway leading out of town to where you jump onto the Trail. Those first few miles are bad enough in that they seem to go uphill forever. It isn't long after you get on the Trail, however, before you realize how good you had it on the road. This is the elevation map for the course:         

     As you can see, you climb over 1200 feet in the first five miles or so. What you can't tell from the map is that the footing is absolutely trecherous. In some stretches it's like running on cobblestones that have all been sharpened to a point. In others, it's like they tore down a five story building, piled up all the rubble, and marked a trail right over the top. Here's a picture of a random portion that was actually one of the more innocent parts:



     Seeing this firsthand has caused me to lower my expectations for what kind of pace we can carry over the first fifteen miles. There's a lot of technique required to run trails like this well without breaking your neck and I, for one, haven't got those skills.  Even Jim, who's run the entire Leadville course, said that patches of the Appalachian Trail are worse than most of Leadville in terms of runability. I saw large portions of the Leadville course and I know what he means. While parts of it looked unrunable to me, at least they are clearly so, like the steeper side of Hope Pass. The thing about the Trail that's dangerous is that you are tempted to run by seemingly harmless stretches that all of a sudden turn into ankle-breaking mine fields.
     Six weeks to go until the race. I think I'd better try to find somewhere around Indy to practice Trail running. Maybe they've torn down a big office building somewhere.

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