Starting off in Monadnock Park, the course is partial paved (through the parking lot of the park) and then rest of the loop is crushed gravel on the Bobby Woodman Trail.

Today, the loop was a little shorter and that meant that there was 9 loops for the half marathon. Knowing that you needed to collect 3 more rubber bands today than yesterday can really mess with your mind... in the end, it's the exact same distance, but since you had more loops to do, it seemed SOO much further! LOL

The course today was on a short beautiful trail that crossed the river on a snowmobile bridge. I give the course today a difficulty of 3 for 2 reasons. 1. coming out of the park, there was a short but steep hill that you needed to go up... 9 TIMES! But that also meant that you needed to go down that hill 9 times also! The other thing that made it a little more difficult was the bridge. Since it was a snowmobile bridge, there were some planks running the length of the bridge to help make sure no snowmobiles went OFF the bridge in the winter. These were in just the right stops that you had to really pay attention to your footing when crossing the wooden bridge! But I was ok with that. The river was beautiful and I wasn't going to complain about seeing it several times!

This would also end up being my slowest half of the series as I was dealing with a sore knee after yesterday race. Yup, day 2 and I was walking! But walking also gave me the opportunity to chat with other runners more. We quickly were becoming our own new little family out there!

The aid station, once again was stocked with everything one could want! for some reason, after starting to accumulate more miles on my feet, the PB&J sandwiches were amazing - and I usually don't even eat PB&J!

Today the aid station came in handy for something else too... the medicine chest! Since I wasn't sure where in the car my ibuprofen was, I hit the small rolling cabinet that was stocked with everything from the medicine cabinet that a runner could need. Sunscreen, bug spray... you name it, it was probably in there. Today I was grateful for the ibuprofen! It helped get me through those miles!

Remember that hill that I mentioned that we needed to go up to get out of the park? I think that hill got steeper and steeper with each loop that we did! But in the end, thanks to my sore knee, it was actually the going DOWN part that was the worst! At one point, I debating trying to hop down on one foot but figured that would not end nicely. So instead, I started walking down it backwards, just to change up what muscles I was using!

Once again, loved the course and as batty as they could drive some people, I am really learning that loops can be fun!

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