First Trail Race successfully completed!

So this Sunday, Heather and I successfully completed an 8K trail race at Montana d'Oro in San Luis Obispo. It was a gorgeous day, thankfully so since it had rained the night before. This was run in Montana d'Oro State Park, just south of Morro Bay.

You start at in Spooner's Cove, and the first 3KM or so are relatively flat, some ups and downs, but nothing bad. I'd joked that Heather and I would line up at the start and then I'd wave goodbye and see her at the finish line, but I actually started the race at a decent pace. It was still chilly so I took off and was going at my standard 10min mile pace (I know, that's really slow, but pretty good for me =)) and that was fine until we hit the climb portion. Then I definitely slowed to a walk-hike-jog pace. Check out the elevation profile of the race:



I was definitely struggling but what kept me going was that we'd driven through Paso Robles on our way down, and were planning on visiting a couple of vineyards before driving back to the Bay Area =). We had good visits at Robert Hall and J.Lohr.

I finished in 1:08.32, roughly 3 minutes behind Heather, so I felt pretty good about it, although on a flat course she would've smoked me by a mile! Here we are after the race:




I was introduced to the Pacific Coast Trail run series by Elizabeth McCleneghan who is an ultra-marathoner and recently set the course record for the Skyline 50KM race! I don't think I'm quite ready for that kind of distance yet!

Overall, I felt pretty good about the race, since I'd had TNT practice the day before and had swum ~2000 yards and biked 20 miles or so. It was a good exercise-filled weekend! Today's waterpolo practice was definitely hard work after the weekend's exertions, but I'm so glad I was in the pool - don't think my body is quite ready for another round of pounding the pavement quite yet.

Shoutouts for this post: Thank you very much to Joe and Beth Zaelit, and Grace Tan!