Today being my birthday, I took a day off from work and went for a run on one of my Favorite trails - the Gray Wolf trail into the Buckhorn wilderness area of Olympic Peninsula. Back in the '80s I would take my family camping there, usually at a campsite called Cliff Camp. Map here: http://www.nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/upload/WildernessMap.pdf. The trail ends at 4.2 miles - it used to go much further but there is a bridge washed out at that point and it is very risky to try to cross the river... I hadn't been there since 1986, but it was as beautiful as I remember - I could almost see my daughter's little blond head disappearing around a bend as she led the way.
I followed the plan I read somewhere in someone's account of Badwater: run the easy parts and walk the hard parts, and made the round trip (8.4 miles) in just under 3 hours. Might seem kind of slow, but remember there are some steep climbs and a lot of scrambling over/around/under windfall trees and such.
I learned a couple of things:
1) Bring more water!!! From now on, whatever I guestimate as the amount of water I need I will just double, then add a few pints
2) I am not in the shape I want to be in. By the end I was getting pretty fatigued, and had some cramping on the way home and after I got there (not fun since I was on a motorcycle!)
3) I am not in as bad shape as I thought I was. I ran most, or at least a significany portion, of the trail, even the hard parts.
4) trail running is a BLAST!
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