Well, it happens

I was feeling confident and fast on Saturday morning. I was one week out from a trail half marathon and decided to run the course and add on the distance from my house to the start line. That added about 5.5 miles for a total of about 18.5 with a  lot of elevation gain and on fairly familiar trails. I had just come out of a sustained climb and had started to pick up speed when I stepped too close to the side of the narrow trail, missed seeing a camouflaged root, tripped and in milliseconds was sprawled out over the trail with cuts, abrasions, embedded pebbles, slivers and a lot of pain. Being a mountain biker, this was all familiar. I waited for about 30 seconds, assessed the damage, got back up and started to run again. One mile later, I went down again and further scraped my right knee. This kind of injury is child's play by comparison to many I have had and really did not slow me down except for the minute it took me to get running again.

That is going to happen on trails. Every running condition is a trade-off. I have concluded that trail running dividends far outweigh the occasional costs of a boo boo once in a while.

I also learned that I make the best energy bar available. I will include that recipe in a later post.

As a side note, I will be shooting for a 2:30 half marathon on Saturday. The terrain is occasionally steep and very rocky. I will report back.