Enjoying some trail mix

If people fall in love everyday, what happens when they do the opposite? Do they fall in hate?
Yeah, that’s dumb, but if there was such a thing, I can tell you the first time I fell in hate -- the first trail race I ever ran two years ago, the seventh annual Shawn M. Nassaney 5K at Bryant University in Smithfield.
I remember that race like it was last weekend because it’s the only time I fell three times in a race and one of the few 5Ks in the past couple of years that I ended up finishing near the 24-minute mark (23:53).
I knew the race was going to take place on a collegiate cross country course that had its share of grassy stretches and some challenging twists, turns, and hills in the woods. What I didn’t know when I signed up for it was that there was going to be a strong rain in the morning and a messy course to deal with that afternoon.
To make a long story short, I came home looking like it was the 1980s again and I was trudging home from a pickup football game at Maplewood Park in Fall River. I was muddy, bruised, and a little battered, all from tripping on a large root in the woods, then slipping on a loose rock, and with less than a quarter mile to go, taking a wild digger on an extra-wet grassy hill.
I remember promising myself on my short drive home that I was all set with trail races and I was sticking to races exclusively on good old asphalt.
And when I took the hour-and-40-minute drive to Milford, N.H. last Sunday to take part in the Ghost Train Rail Trail race, I remembered that 5K and my promise and wondered why in the world I was driving to New Hampshire at 6:30 a.m. to run in a tough 15-mile trail race.
The answer is simple -- I’m getting ready for the Barbados Marathon and I was looking for a nice 14-17 mile run in the morning. I could have went to my old reliable spots at Lincoln Woods, the East Providence-to-Bristol bike path, or the back roads of Scituate and Greenville to bang it out, but Bozena found this race on coolrunning.com and wanted to do it. I figured it’d be a lot different and more fun than your normal long-distance training route, so one thing led to another and off we went to the Granite State.
This was the second year of this race, and while last year’s race drew just 28 runners, this one had 63 finishers! Any time you see a race more than double its participants in its second year, that should tell you that the folks who run this race did something right that first year!
Anyway, this was a training run and I wasn’t going to focus on breaking two hours, so I hanged along the back of the pack and ran with Bozena. Neither one of us wanted to get lost, and even though there were lots of blue ribbons and white markings on the trees along the course, it could have been easy to do that because after four miles, it was a little tough to spot the runners in front and back of us in the woods.
Plus, I remembered that I did average a spill a mile at the Nassaney race, so I ran with caution and didn’t end up falling once. Rather, it was Bozena who took a tumble on the second mile! She landed on her wrist, but because she landed on some soft pine needles, she bounced back up and was good to go the rest of the way.
I had my moments stumbling on large roots sticking out of the ground and a rock or two, but other than that, nothing treacherous happened and I got an exceptional run. And I really enjoyed touring this course, the way the trees seemed to form a canopy above most of the course, the colorful foliage …
In a nutshell, here’s some things about the course. You had a short tunnel to run through during the first mile under Route 101, some, short challenging hills after that, a beautiful view of Lake Potanipo, more great scenery and an aid/water station at the “Four Corners” part of the race (at the 3½-/11½-mile mark), a quick ¾-mile run on a street, some more woods to run through, and a comfortable half-mile run on asphalt through a summer camp and toward a small covered bridge, where on the other side, there was the halfway point, another aid/water station, and someone tracking down the 7½-mile splits of the runners.
Most of the course took place on what used to be the Brookline and Milford railroad tracks from the late 19th and early 20th century. Back then, Granite was hauled from Milford and ice from Lake Potanipo to Massachusetts. The rails were eventually removed from the ground for scrap metal during World War II, but some of the railroad ties are still stuck in the ground, and if you look close enough, you could see them on the trail.
We were shooting to run 12-minute miles and finish this race in under three hours, and when we hit 1:30:21 at the halfway mark, I thought we were well on our way. But when Bozena started to crash a bit for the last two miles, we slowed down a bit until the end and ended up finishing in 3:08:56.
There were a ton of volunteers throughout the woods, on the streets, and at the aid/water stations, and when we finished (once you crossed a small gray bridge behind the start of the race at the Milford DPW), there were a dozen volunteers waiting for the rest of the runners to finish and cheering each one as they crossed the bridge.
In two weeks, I will be running another long-distance trail race surprisingly called the Air Line Trail Ghost Run -- mentioning these races back-to-back can be very confusing! It’s a half marathon that also exclusively takes place in the forest, but 10 miles of it is on a stonedust path and the other 3.1 miles is on the street. Again, you have lots of great scenery, but you don’t have the twists or turns of the Ghost Train Rail Trail race, nor do you have to worry about what’s under your feet when you run.
All in all, if I get the opportunity to run the Ghost Train Rail Trail race again next year, especially if I’m preparing for a late-year marathon, I’ll definitely do it again. It’s an eventful run that you don’t get everyday, and it just might make me fall out of hate with trail races!