Weekend Rundown

After finding about this event, an adventure race held a couple weeks ago on the Ice Age Trail, I was interested to see how it turned out. I am always intrigued to find out how long it takes others to cover certain parts of my favorite trail.

According to the results, the leaders covered the first 16 miles of the event, from Butler Lake to the Northern-most trailhead, in about 4:15. Seemed a bit slow to me.

So what's next? Run it, of course!

I was on my way down to the North Trailhead around 7:30 and arrived a couple minutes before 8. It was looking pretty quiet.

You can barely see it in the picture, but the trail is packed in, flat, and wide. Nice! This was one thing I was worried about, as I roll my ankle every time I run this trail. At this point I decided that I would definitely be able to run it faster than 4:15...mostly because all of the participants in the Frozen Otter had packed in the trail for me! I ended up finding out 4:15 is an amazing time for the leaders, who likely broke the trail for the majority of their hike.

After meeting up with a lady and 3 dogs, two cross country skiers (to ski the IAT is a bit crazy), and a couple snowshoe hikers (who agreed having their snowshoes on was pointless with the trail in this condition), I reached the Greenbush Ski area, complete with what had to be 50 cars. As I crossed a couple of the ski trails, I only saw a couple skiers:

Can you see them?

Another neat part of this trail is the access to several forest shelters, all of which were occupied, with a fire going, when I came through. Unfortunately, at some point my camera froze, leaving me with this picture of the Parnell Shelter:

Overall, I covered the Northern 16 miles of the trail in 2:58. I felt great the whole time and really seemed to hit the nutrition spot on. I felt like I could have gone forever on Saturday.

I came home raving so much about the run and the condition of the trail that Ellie was talked into going back out there today to get some miles in before I eat too much food tonight during the game. The thermometer read 43 degrees today (!) but didn't account for the 25 mph wind. It was a bad idea to wear shorts, but I enjoyed myself, nonetheless. Another 4 miles today brought up my mileage to 39 for the week. Not bad! Next week I'm aiming for 50.