Payoff

The team of Scout and Squirrel have logged some long, hard, miles this winter in trying conditions.  We were out there many hours.  I think back to our first BL of the year; Yikes!  Then our last 25 miler, two weekends ago, seemed like such a grind.  Saturday, we had another 25 to do.  We settled on warming up on the hills on the mountain before running a loop of the BBU, then finishing up with hill repeats on Lunch Break till we had our mileage.

We ran out Northern Loop to the Ski Trail till it met back up with Northern Loop.  We took that till we got to Terrace for our quick down.  We did that three times then headed up South Ridge.  I think that is an overlooked hill for repeats. We ran down Terrace again, then back to the start.  We'd be heading out on the BBU loop with almost 5 miles already under our belts.  The hills could have seemed hard, but we were pretty intent on our catching up.  Mindy had a trip back to PA to tell me about with cute Briellen stories and I had a bunch of work and home stuff to fill her in on.

Normally when we do a loop of the BBU starting from the park, we have 5.5ish when done with the ease side.  Cause of the hill start we were closer to 11.  It felt like we were ahead of the game.  The Squirrel debated changing socks, but decided they'd just be instantly wet again.  I stopped back at the car to refill my t.p. stash.  SIDE BAR:  can you believe the first available appointment to the GI doc is Sept. 19th???  I guess I could try other practices, but it was already work to set up one appt.

I'm not sure where we were when I noticed we'd been running 3 hrs 35 minutes.  Can you believe we've been running that long?  No way.  Time was just flying by.  When we reached the summit, we still made time to check the raptor tally board - nothing of note, yet.

We ran down LB to the school.  From there I would keep recalculating to see how many repeats we really needed to get in our 25 miles.  Our garmins did a few little blippy things to make us a little uncertain for a bit.  Instead of the end seeming a grind, we just had complaints of hunger.  We guessed and imagined the thing E&Ls would have waiting for us.

I think my Garmin was a bit behind Mindy's when we finished up, but both of us were over 25.  When I put it on SportTracks, it ended up being 25.6.  We were way less tired than the previous 25er.  I'm pretty sure the lousy snow running is great conditioning; it was all paying off.

Sunday we hit the east side.  Mindy, Rick and I headed out like we were doing the Bruiser.  Rick left us at the 5 mile mark to walk back in.  The Squirrel and I continued mostly on the Bruiser course, but I did switch it up so we went up Fox West, Ginn and back down the snomo trail rather than up.  We finished with just over 10.