Cougar Mountain Trail Race 10.75 miles

Current Mile total: 836.25 miles

This weekend is going to be a tough one. Today I picked up Kathleen and headed out to Cougar Mountain to run the first half of my first very tough weekend of training. Tomorrow will be 23 miles up at Crystal Mountain again. We get there and there are lots of runners, nearly a hundred I think. Scott is there laying down the rules of the run and there are some running celebrities. We ended up getting a nice pair of trail running socks instead of a shirt as part of our entry and $15 of our entry goes toward maintaining the trails up on the mountain. Nice deal. I'm wearing my new trail running shoes for the first time but decide to leave my Gaitors off for this run. Gaitors being essentially spats for your shoes that cover the top and prohibit loose debris from falling inside the shoes. We head out and jeesh is it humid. This is the first time I really sweat since living in Seattle. But its not too bad. We had decided that today we needed to try to take it as easy as possible as to save ourselves for tomorrow. And we almost did just that until around 4-5 miles when Kathleen decided she wanted to pick up the pace a little. This girl is a competitor. So we picked it up just a touch but still were very conservitive. I had seen Sherry and Michael(runners from the Footzone club) before the race and we ended up passing them. But we ended up passing a lot of people. The training we have been doing has really strengthened us to a new level and even maintaining a conservative pace we were stronger than a lot of runners out there. Its a very good feeling. At any rate, it was still a tough race. Lots of climbs and toward the end both of us were thinking, "I hope we don't regret this tomorrow". We finish the course in 1:58 which considering our slow pace was great. We heard afterward that a lot of runners had seen a black bear out on the course. I missed it, oh well, not sure I would have wanted to see it anyways.