Trail Running–A Whole Different Animal

On Monday, Pam wrote about how the two of us went running together in the hills around my parents’ house down in SoCal.

Actually, during the week, we were able to run together twice (my only two runs of the week unfortunately). The first run was a flat 6-miler on the horse trail that cuts through the heart of Arcadia and Monrovia, CA. It’s a much better run than on the streets–there’s no traffic, no pedestrians or bikes, and no traffic signals to have to worry about. It’s even hard packed dirt for the most part instead of sidewalk or asphalt. I was really surprised to see such low traffic on such a great place to run.

The flat, horse trail run was great. Since I was running with Pam, who’s a much faster runner than me, I felt a little bit of pressure to pick up the pace. This pressure was totally self inflicted by the way. But nevertheless, I wanted to run a bit faster than the easy pace that I was supposed to run. We clipped off 6 miles in about 50 minutes which comes out to around an 8:20 pace–so the easy run turned into a bit of a tempo run for me. It felt great though. I was exerting myself but not killing myself and I could still hold a conversation while running. Plus, I got to exercise with my wife again.

But Sunday’s run was a whole different animal. If you’re interested, you can go back to the post and look at the elevation profile of the run to see the climbing and descending that we managed over the 7.5 mile jaunt through the wilderness. That run was completed in 1 hour and 45 minutes with an average pace of over 14 minutes per mile. At some point during the run, I asked Pam how much faster she would be going if I weren’t with her and she said that some of the walking we did on the uphill she would have run and that she could have managed the downhills a little bit faster as well. I think the final number she came up with was about 15 minutes faster than we ran it together.

I woke up on Monday really sore. My ankle was tender from the fall I almost took after rolling it over on a rock. My calves were like knots and my quads were pretty tender. But I expected these ailments. What I wasn’t expecting was to be sore in my shoulders and back and ribcage. Basically, my entire body was sore from this hill workout instead of just my “running muscles” that are usually sore after a long time on my feet. I was even more sore throughout the day on Tuesday, but by last night I was starting to feel a lot better. My first real taste of trail running opened my eyes to the amazing things that ultra-runners are able to accomplish.

All the pain and suffering over the last two days was totally worth it though. The spectacular scenery is just not something you get while running on the street. And it feels good to be sore. My body is telling me that it worked hard. It’s also telling me that it survived and can do it again. I’m willing to give it another go as well. Who knows, maybe we have another budding trail runner in the family. We’ll see.