The skinny:
1:24:46
18 of 66
This was the fifth race in the Knoxville Track Club's "Treddin' Troddin Trails series and was a new race on the schedule for 2015. The course wound its way through William H. Hastie Natural Area which is also part of Knoxville's Urban Wilderness.
Race morning was a little on the cool side, at least for May. There was cloud cover and light rain that morning as well. The light rain, along with the fact that The Knoxville Family Challenge Triathlon was being held the same morning made for a little bit of an adventure getting to south Knoxville where the race started. After a few detours for cyclist in the Tri, I made it to the Anderson School where the race start was.
At first, it looked like the race was going to be pretty lightly attended. Honestly, my first thought was "good, rain is keeping a few folks away". As it turns out, the race start was delayed a bit because several folks, like myself, were having trouble getting to the start because of the Triathlon closures in downtown. As 9:30 approached there was a pretty sizeable crowd though. The extra wait wasnt too bad because it did give me a chance to talk a little longer with a couple of my "running" friends.
The race didnt start out too bad. It was an asphalt start which led to a faster pace getting to the woods and allowed the crowd to thin out before the trails started. It was only a short distance into the woods when I could tell I wasnt going to be able to keep up with the lead pack. Try as I might, I finally lost sight of them and settled in to run a while by myself. Seems to happen every race. not fast enough for the lead pack and too fast for the rest of the pack.
At around mile 3 the 9 mile runners took a right and headed out onto an out and back of about 4 miles, most of which seemed to go downhill. I was pretty happy to see that I wasnt passing any runners coming back up the trail for quite a while, it let me know that I was still fairly close to the front. We crossed a couple of wooden bridges along the way which were a little treacherous in my Salomon Speedcross trail shoes. I tip toed across them on the way out without any issues though.
At the end of the out and back section a race volunteer was standing on a turn in the trail and was letting us know that we needed to run to the road and turn around. As I was coming back to the corner where the volunteer was standing after turning around I had a major slip. Completely lost my footing on the damp and slick trail for a second. When I did I immediately felt my right hamstring pull. I do remember hearing the woman volunteering say "nice catch" as I went by her because I never hit the ground. I have no idea how I stayed upright though. For the rest of the way up the out and back I started to feel more and more discomfort. By the time I got back off of the out and back section I felt like I was limping pretty good. I did have a guy that I had caught up with that was setting a good pace which helped a lot, but eventually I lost sight of him and ended up being passed by 7 runners before the finish.
Not the race I had hoped for after taking a couple of months off from trail racing, but its always a great time running the trail series regardless of outcome.
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