I headed out to Elm Creek again this morning to run with a couple other guys and got to experience the 11 mile loop that is the mountain bike singletrack. I did my best this week to keep up my miles and do some cross training, and I can tell it helped. Last week I bailed at about 7.2 miles on the horse trails. Today I managed to persevere and made it the entire 11 miles. I have to say if it hadn’t been for the two guys helping me get through it I would probably have made it, but ended up taking an hour longer. They kept me motivated and pushed me like a good pacer should.

The conditions of the trail were incredible. Just enough snow had fallen this week to make it extremely runnable, and because of an upcoming bike race on the trail, it was groomed really nicely. The singletrack course is a lot of really quick up and downs and hundreds of curves. In fact by the end, my hip was hurting a bit from all the turning. None of the hills are very steep, but there’s dozens of them and it makes for a lot of challenging footwork as you round the top of a small hill and then have to navigate a curvy downhill.

I’m glad I managed to get this done today. It was super tough, and I’m hurting this afternoon, but I know that it’s the kind of training that will help me persevere on tougher courses and races later this year. Next week I’m running a simple Valentine’s Day 5k with the wife, but I’ll probably head back out to the singletrack in a couple weeks again to keep working at it.