Mission Accomplished

At the beginning of April, I started running again for the first time since my neck operation.  I made a goal at that time to run the Project Athena 15K trail run on May 8.  Well, I completed the race (maybe survived is a better description), and finally feel recovered after about a week of rest. 

I finished 13th overall out of 66 runners, and 2nd in my age group.  My time was 1:42:39 which is really slow, but the winning time was only a 9 minute/mile pace so that's a testament to how grueling the course was.  One of the runners measured the actual distance on his GPS, and it was 9.7 miles - slightly longer than the advertised 15K.  We don't know exactly how much elevation gain there was, but a friend mentioned that a similar hike she does out there has about 2000 ft of gain.  In any event, there was a lot of climbing, some very steep descents, a couple of river crossings, some singletrack, and even running along a streambed.  Overall, a very sweet course.  What probably made it particularly tough was the temperature - it was hot.  There weren't very many aid stations so I was glad I was carrying my own water.  Even so, I was wilting in the last mile, and was so glad to see the finish line.

Ok, now to start thinking about the next goal...probably something like a Half Marathon trail run.  Long term goal is the Catalina Marathon which is a very hilly, very tough, all trail marathon.

ps.  I got beat at the Project Athena race by a 65 yr old dude.  That's incentive to keep going no matter how old you are!