Sunday, June 1, 2008

Lake Chabot Trail Challenge


A nice half marathon trail race in the East Bay hills is the Lake Chabot Trail Challenge. This year is the 25th year of the event, and the fourth year I've run it. When I first ran it in 2003, in 2:01:27, I had never run 13.1 miles up to that point. Now I use the race to see how my training is doing, and how fast I can run the loop around the lake.

In past years, I have run as fast as 1:48 on this hilly course. Since I regularly run around the lake, often on Tuesday night runs, I felt I could pull off a better time this year, even though I don't technically do any speed work. And since a friend gave me some grief for going out slow at Miwok 100k, and then passing dozens of runners the last 40+ miles, I thought I would properly warm up with a few miles before the race, go out at a strong pace, and run as fast a time as I could manage. Well, it worked fairly well. I finished in 1:41:10, or 7:43/miles. I haven't seen the results, but that's sometimes good for top 5 in my age group. Not bad for a lllloooonnnngggg distance runner.

Perhaps I'll come back another year and see if I can get under 1:40.

Update: Here are the results. I guess my run was good enough for 24th place out of 243 runners, and fourth place in my age group.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How much grief did you get for agreeing to crew at WS for that same slow runner with whom you ran so slow at Miwok?!

Jeffery Rogers said...

Funnily enough, they don't give me grief for that at all. I have a bit of a reputation of not taking races seriously enough. I point out that most are called runs, not races, but that doesn't convince anyone.

Now that I'm feeling fully recovered from my long injury in my hip, I'll try to run fast. But only one more time, at White River, before Mt. Blanc.