a mid summer plan

My recovery from the leg injury at Mohican took longer than expected & taxed my patience! I missed out on some unseasonably cool weather -- just my luck! Finally getting back into training on the trails after the cool spell though, it seemed I kept that same very slow pace of my last few races. So I went to the track to do some intervals. I wasn't surprised -- I was shocked at how slow I was! I had been neglecting speed works for too long & it showed in my race performances the last few months. So I've got a plan for this hot summer: no BR100 and shorter trail runs with regular track workouts (or 5k - 10k's). And it so happened that Jim Ball with The Trail Store had a 10k trail race set up for Saturday. I had not run a trail race this short before, so it sounded like a good challenge & a quick start to my plan:

Yost 10k

I arrived at the start (less than 5 minutes from the house!) at about 7:40 a.m. It was warmer than forecast (naturally) and very humid. The course consisted of the Yost (Yellow) loop of the Jefferson Memorial Forest plus a short piece on the road added at the start to space out the runners. This is the same loop as the trail portion of the 2nd section of the Louisville's Lovin' the Hills (LLTH) 50K/15M that's in February, but this race is run clockwise around the loop instead. I guess the direction was changed to keep the race from starting with the biggest hill on the course. Running in this direction, the last half mile to the finish is downhill & it sure was nice to look forward to!


At the starting line, after a show of hands, it appeared about 20% had not run a trail race before. I started midpack among the 50 or so runners who toed the line. Apparently that's where I belonged as only 3 runners passed me that I wouldn't pass back the entire race and I passed very few. The course was very familiar, yet so different running in this direction for the 1st time. I had run this loop many a time in the other direction training for & running the LLTH 50k each year. During LLTH, I run (jog) up most of the hills this loop, but not during this 10k race -- of course temps were about 30 to 60 degrees warmer than at any LLTH & I was certainly not in the same shape! My legs were up to the task this race, my breathing was not as I was gasping to catch my breath. Which only confirmed this is where I need to do more training!!


I finally took the time to upload my GPS data to BIMactive.com (Bones In Motion website). It was recommended as a site to obtain a more accurate representation of the elevation data obtained from Garmin's GPS watches. After looking at the graph, I totally agree! The graph looks very much like what I remember the course to be -- absolutely nothing like the graph I get directly from the watch. Plus the watch says 2437' of elevation gain . . . the bimactive.com graph shows 1627' which I believe is much more representative. One thing, however, which is not changed when uploading to the bimactive.com site is the distance measurement. It uses the watch measurements -- which I found my Garmin 405 to be inaccurate on hilly, forested courses. I wheeled the Yost loop last winter & it measured 5.85 miles. With the added road segment at the start, this race should be close to 6.00 miles, not the 5.56 miles shown by the watch (& on bimactive.com).