Soooo I ran a trail race this morning. In the rain. In freezing temperatures. AND I managed to overdress. I was stripping off clothes left and right. LOL.

This was the final race in the 6 mile series for 2017.

The race was ok and my usual #1 critique of trail races still applies here: for the first 2 miles or so, people were SUPER AGGRESSIVE when passing or when coming up behind you. The entirety of this 6 mile race was on single-track trail which I get: passing is challenging. I had trouble passing people, even. But I was still courteous and said “on your left” and tried to not get in their way and definitely tried to speed up when passing so I wasn’t just leap frogging in front of someone and then slowing them down. The vast majority of people who passed me in the first 2 miles did none of those things and without touching me basically pushed me off the trail so they could get by. Numerous people squeezed into space in front of me that caused me to slow down. Others came barreling up behind you and stayed on your heels until you had no other choice but to stop running and step aside. It was super irritating. I think I’m going to look a lot more closely at trail race descriptions in the future and stay away from single track trails. It’s just too much.

There was a descent amount of elevation change on this trail (+/- 1100ish). The red on the map attached is Gain and the green is Loss.

But, goodness, at the end of the race, a tiny bit of blue sky peeked through the dreary clouds and it was gorgeous.

Of the four races in this series, I ran this one the slowest. I’m not 100% sure why other than the super cold temperatures and pouring down rain. That was definitely a factor. But shouldn’t have impacted my pace that much. But I guess it did. I think it was also the issue I talked about earlier: lots of people on single track, muddy, trails. It was very hard to pass so the first few miles I ran a little slower than I knew I was capable of. And people were being super aggressive and that raises my anxiety level so much.