Saturday was the Jim Bridger Trail Run. I took it upon myself a couple of months ago to encourage a bunch of my friends to run it with me. There ended up being 6 of us that ran this 10 mile trail race. Which was a lot more than the 3 of us who ran it last year. It had poured rain each night leading up to Saturday morning. Saturday morning was not much different. When we woke up, it had been pouring rain all night and was still raining. It finally cleared around 7:30. I was hoping that we would be in luck and it wouldn’t rain for another several hours. In fact, I was praying that it would hold off until at least 1. Some of our friends met us at our house as we headed up towards the trail head. It looked like it was starting to clear and warm up. We hung around with our friends for about 30 minutes before the race started.
Now, I was running with 4 guys and 1 girl. The guys definitely had not been running as much as me or my other friend. Although, since they are guys, I knew that they would speed off and make it in way before I would cross the line. I figured that I would at least be able to hang out with my friend Nikki. For the most part, we run about the same and she had been having IT Band issues. We didn’t know how the race would go for her. I had been doing a lot of trail running and just came off of my marathon a month ago. I was ready to kill my time from last year. I got Brent to run a couple of runs with me other the last several weeks, so he was fairly close to being ready.
The race started and we took off down the little hill towards the private road that would connect us from the Sypes Canyon trail to the Middle Cottonwood trail. All the guys took off running ahead of Nikki and I. It was the best place to gain distance on everyone and to get ahead. We wanted to conserve some of that energy for the hill, so we hung back a little. The road started to climb and I was already feeling the elevation gain. I was excited to see the trail. It gave me a little more motivation and energy. We caught up to Brent and actually got a head of him for a little while. The trail was slowly winding up the mountain as more and more people started to pass. We came across a couple of creek crossing where I tried my hardest to stay dry. I should have just ran through since the rain and mud was coming.
We hit the end of the Middle Cottonwood trail and started up the Bridger Foothills trail. This was where the real climb began. Nikki went on ahead of me as I tried to keep up with her. Then, the mud came. There had been a little bit of mud on the Middle Cottonwood trail, but it was easy to maneuver around. This mud was slippery and everywhere on the trail. I couldn’t keep my feet from slipping. Now, this trail was also very steep in spots. This made it even harder for me. I stopped off to the side to let a few people pass me as my friend started getting farther and farther away. I was starting to get a little disappointed as I knew that this would be where I lost all my time. I wasn’t going to beat my time from last year. Last year, I wasn’t running like I did this year, but I also didn’t have a trail stopping me. I just couldn’t get past that mud. The rain was pouring off and on at this point.
Brent caught up to me and started moving ahead. He decided he wanted to wait for me and kept stopping off to the side of the trail. We finally made it up high enough to start running a little more often. I was feeling great. I knew that because of the mud I hadn’t pushed myself like I had wanted to. We got to the top and Brent slowly started getting out of sight. He is a beast running downhill. I was picking up speed and feeling great. Last year on the downhill, I could hardly move. This year, I could have kept running a couple more miles. The rain kept coming and then the hail started pelting us as we moved along. It actually hurt a lot more than I thought it would. I stopped off under a tree for a quick moment. I shook out my hands and gave myself a little bit of a pep talk to run in the hail. I started up again and just pushed myself through it. The hail finally stopped, but the rain kept going.
By the time I was about a half mile away from the bottom, the rain finally stopped. The end was near and I was excited to me done, but thinking about how all of my friends beat me. It was probably good that they did to help kick the little bit of inner competition I always feel. I don’t like being the last one (last of my friends anyways). I definitely don’t like being the one that trained the most and being the last one. But, I was. That is just how it went. Like I said last year, maybe next year. I guess I need to do a few more hill repeats and run in more slippery mud. The race took me about 4 more minutes than last year. My friend Nikki, beat me by almost 20 minutes! She has sore knees but her IT Band was pretty good for the most part. I was excited for her. Brent came in only a couple minutes before me. Our other 3 guys friends, killed it! They did great, especially for not training at all.
