The last event of the  Winter Trail Series  was held yesterday at Soaring Eagle park in Sammamish, the Frost Eagle event which this year was neither frosty or mucky for once.     As usual I arrived early to help with setup and registration before the run. Everything went pretty smoothly given that we had a few no-shows on volunteers and both of us doing registration were running too but we got it taken care of and both got ready to run before the start.

I started out right up front knowing I needed to get a jump on the crowd of over 200 runners in the 5-mile event before hitting the single track or this run can became a conga line since there is very little room to pass on most of the trails.   I was shocked that the main pipeline trail wasn’t a total mud-fest like it has been in the past, they have obviously done some drainage work on it so the Lunas worked just fine today as they have on all the Winter events.   I kept up a good pace all the way down the pipeline and into the single track, catching up with a few slower half marathoners and having to pass on the tight trails but never really dropped pace too much.   For most of the last 3 miles I had a big gap I was running in where I didn’t have to worry about passing or being passed which was perfect.  I crossed the finish in 41:34 which was flying for Soaring Eagle, my previous PR at that park was 46:03 so I cut that time by almost 5 minutes and was only a minute slower than my Redmond Watershed time and the Watershed is a much easier place to run.   Finished 15th overall for men out of 74 runners and 4th out of 17 for the over 50 crowd.  I’m still awaiting the final results for the series but by my calculations I probably finished 3rd or 4th in the Masters division and 10th or 11th overall out of over 400 runners, last year I finished 18th out of about 300 runners so I definitely improved but was still pretty sick last year.

Next week is the start of the Half Marathon Trail Series with the Ft. Ebey Half Marathon, seriously the toughest half marathon I’ve ever run.   In 2013 when I ran this before getting sick I did it in 2:24.  I really don’t know what to expect this time around.  I haven’t gone further than 10 miles to date but at least I’ve been doing some 6-8 mile runs up and down Tiger Mountain to get me some of the elevation.  Should be interesting and really I just want to finish, I’ll push for speed at the Redmond Watershed on March 6th where the course is much flatter and I have a chance of a new half PR.   At the moment I’m signed up for the first three of the half marathon runs along with a couple of 25k runs that I’m signed up for in April and May.  Going to be a high mileage spring for me.