Training Log Archive: Ari-o

Lincoln and Jess were in town and wanted to go for a run, so we did—slowly—around the Charles. Lovely morning for a run and I think they found it novel to run in the city. I went about as fast as I could, which was not very fast!

Friday, 7:20 a.m.

Tom: Do you want to go do an adventure this weekend?
Ari: Does the pope shit in the woods?
Tom: I've been thinking about doing the whole of the Davis Path for a while.
Ari: Me too!
Tom: Want to leave at 3 or 7?
Ari: I have class until 5, how about 6:30?

Drove up, crashed at Fourth Iron (25˚ and clear, no need for a tent; turns out sleeping in my 20˚ bag on my 0˚ bag on a pad is top notch) for a pre-dawn start. Woke up at 5, hit the trail by 5:40, sunrise off of Mount Crawford. The Davis Path is long but beautiful, remote, and never boring. Up each of the side mountains, nice views. No other hikers for the first 12 miles past Isolation.

Busier up over Boott Spur with the last of the ice melting off the rocks and signs; the trail was mostly fine except for a few places (the last pitch down to Lakes was the worst in the shade, quite icy). We got to the Crawford Path and neither of us had any interest in heading for the summit. I convinced Tom the Crawford Path was a better run down and a much easier hitch, so we did that. By Lakes, run to Franklin, around Ike, down to Mizpah for snacks (gummy bears!) and to see the beautiful new croo room, then down to Crawford, where we immediately got a hitch from a libertarian Queeb.

Legs felt good the whole way, and we didn't push hard too much by >2k of climb and 23 miles is nothing really to sneeze at. As usual, 3 mph for a White Mountain trail run is about par for the course. (I've realized that the FKTs for various trails are generally in the 3.5-5 mph range.)

PR hills day. My legs didn't feel great, but it was cool and dry and breezy, a good day for running for me. I ran a PR for PR days, but have still run faster during hill indian sprints. Could have gone faster on the first three hills, maxed out around HR=170 so that was good. Didn't drop the hills as fast as I could have, either. Still a nice day.

Some hill bounding to cool down, because that's a thing.

Raceman. It never gets easier. It shouldn't be so hard. But you have to go hard.

Run around MIT track, then along the river to Whole Paycheck, where they didn't have the thing I wanted.

Fun run with Alex and Jess in Concord. Alex seemed to know where to go and Jess and I sort of followed along; she kept us in the right places somehow. Lots of woods back there, and we certainly didn't cover all the trails.