Father & daughter ready to run the Seward Solstice Run.

It had been way too long since I’d actually participated in a trail run event.  I’ve done a lot of setup/registration work and quite a bit of photography this season but have scarcely run since early March aside from one 5-miler in May that proved I couldn’t really run.   For the last month or so my hamstring has definitely begun really healing and I’m not in pain much any more instead of being in pain most of the time.   I started building up some miles indoors with no impact on an OpenStride machine and also began taking advantage of nice days and doing fairly long 4-6 mile trail walks at around a 15:00/mile pace.  In the last weeks I’ve begun very lightly trotting for about 1 minute per mile.  While I’m a bit sore the next day it goes away and doesn’t feel like a re-injury.

So, I decided it was time to get back out there and ended the year with Northwest Trail Run’s Seward Solstice run.  They offered a 4.2 mile and 10k distances and I decided to play it safe and do the shorter route, plus I talked Kristen into doing it with me and 10k would have probably been a bit much.  We lucked out in that the big snow event happened the day before instead of the day of the race and it didn’t feel like running in Alaska like the Redmond Watershed event did a few weeks ago.   We arrived early to just a nice overcast, helped setup tents and I helped with registration while Kristen helped get the aid station together.

After the pre-race talk we took off with us in the back of the pack.  I promised I’d walk most of it but it was quickly clear that my 14:00-15:00/mile walk pace was Kristen’s jog pace so while I walked she jogged and when I slowed down to ‘run’ she walked.  It actually worked pretty well.  The trails were pretty mellow, especially the trail out to the end of the peninsula which was wide, smooth and an easy grade.  At the turn-around it turned into single track with some fallen logs, roots, rocks, etc… that was a bit more technical but going slow there was no worry about tripping.  Near the start/finish area there was a field which was kind of a mud pit but a short mud pit.   Kind of glad I wore my Inov-8 TrailRocs instead of my Luna Osos for that one piece.  Lap one done and we were off on lap two, repeating the course and going a little slower on the single track section and getting passed by some 10k runners.

We did manage to cross the finish line in about 59:00, I forgot to turn my watch off until 1:00:26 over a minute later.  About a 14 min/mile pace, not too bad for mostly walking the course.    Amazingly I did not have a DFL finish, we were ahead of at least a few other walk/run participants.    My plan now, keep doing some events like this, mostly walking and a bit of running.  The running will, hopefully increase and speed up.  Until then I’ll be a back-of-the-packer and just have fun out in the woods.