A Personal Best 50k Time Trial

Training has been going well for the past seven months. In the midst of the pandemic and my first year raising twins, things really started to click back in September. At the time most races had been cancelled, so I started running all the Ithaca area trail race courses and popular trail routes at race effort. The consistent, quality mileage carried over through the winter in the form of tempo runs and steady state runs on rail trails and roads. With no Beast of Burden to train for this winter, I kept the mileage lower than I did in previous years—50 to 65 miles per week for most weeks. In a few weeks it was lower due to inclement weather, being homebound with sick kids, or both. But the consistency was there, and it paid off. 

Once race director Adam Engst began opening courses for the recently launched FLRC Challenge virtual race, I gained extra motivation to run hard on the race's road courses while waiting for the sloppy, snowy trails to dry out. Tempo intervals and fartlek runs on the Challenge's Pseudo Skunk half marathon course, marathon-pace efforts on the 10-mile Black Diamond Trail course, and so on, kept the fitness gains coming all the way into April. When our local trails finally thawed and dried enough to run

Solo Trail Racing Through the Pandemic

After feeling worn out and miserable for most of the summer, I got back in the game with a non-race effort at the Hash House Hundred Fast-Ass 100k in late August. That left me wanting to get back into racing trail races and ultramarathons, but of course autumn in 2020 brought another slew of race cancellations courtesy of la 'rona. Throughout the summer I was expecting as much, and came up with a creative way to get in some quality mileage and satiate the trail racing bug.

The project involved attempting a PR on as many of the local trail race courses as I could. For some races, this meant running each of the different distances offered for the event, i.e. the 13k, 26k, and marathon on the Thom B course. Many of these races I'd run at less than 100% effort during the buildup to various ultras. Some, like the FL50s 25k and 50k distances, I'd never raced at all. With a few exceptions, I chose race courses 16 miles and shorter and within a half hour drive of Ithaca. I ran all of them on my own, unsupported or self-supported, following the courses from memory. 

Although the first three listed aren't race courses, I've included them because they're established and noteworthy routes. A few notable courses, like Forge the Gorge, the traditional Lucifer's Crossing course, the Monster Marathon at Treman, and my usual

FLT Interloken Branch FKT Fail

With virtually every spring and summer race cancelled, Fastest Known Time runs have been all the rage these past few months. Ultrarunning media outlets are reporting en masse on FKTs, with loads of obscure new routes popping up and times falling on some of the more competitive FKTs.

Early this year I had the idea of establishing a baseline FKT on the Finger Lakes Trail's Interloken Branch in the Finger Lakes National Forest. This trail runs 11.2 miles north to south through the forest, connecting with the main FLT at the Interloken's southern terminus. It's mostly flat singletrack and notorious for it's copious volume of mud, especially on the sections where horseback riding is allowed. Anyone who's run a loop or three at the Finger Lakes 50s is familiar with the southern half of the Interloken. 

As of February there was no FKT listed at FastestKnownTime.com, so I figured I'd be the first to put it on the site. After running around in the FLNF on the final day of the Aravaipa Strong 100, I decided to commit to an Interloken Trail FKT attempt sometime later in the spring, once the trail had a chance to dry out. The plan was to run the full out-and-back, 22.4 miles, unsupported. I came home to check the official FKT Web site and found that Dana Wood, of Corning, New York, had beaten me to it only a few weeks earlier. He had run the out-and-back in 3:47:22 on April 5, starting and ending at the southern end. 

The Pine Creek Gorge West Rim Trail

I first learned about the Pine Creek Gorge West Rim Trail from Phil Maynard last year after he hiked it with his son over two days. He described it as smooth and fairly fast, unlike most of the technical, rock-strewn singletrack that winds its way through the Pennsylvania Wilds. Phil ran a south to north  FKT on the West Rim earlier this year, which re-piqued my interest in making this adventure run happen.

I'd only been down to the PA Wilds area once, when I ran the Eastern States 100 in 2017. That race covers only a few miles of the West Rim Trail, near the trail's southern end. My friend Amelia and I decided to head down on a weekday to run the trail end-to-end, an impromptu 50k. We drove to Pine Creek Oufitters, an outdoor gear and rental store in Wellsboro near the West Rim's north end. The store offers shuttle rides to the opposite end of the trail (or other drop off points on this and other trails). For us it was $40 for the 30-minute ride. The driver let us park the car at the north terminus parking lot on Colton Road instead of having us leave the car at the store. This way we didn't have to run an extra mile on asphalt at the end to get back to the store. Other possible transportation arrangements include parking a car at each end, or for the more adventurous and multi-sport inclined,