Monday, 5-13 - 4.5 Miles (Trail) - Hewitt Farm Trails, North Stonington Village. Awesome gem tucked away between the NoSto fairgrounds, Ryder Road and Route 2...100+ acres of rolling farmlands, forest and wetlands, streams and a dam, and good singletrack trail criss-crossing the property. One good hill, but pretty mellow overall. This will be the warm-up area for the NSEF race on the 25th. Perfect day for it, nice and cool! Good start to the week :), and just passed the 500 mile mark for the year! Awesome!!!
Tuesday, 5-14 - 2.5 Miles (Trail) - Cossaduck Hill to the beaver dam out/back. Small window of opportunity before I went to Town Hall to support FireFly Farms, and I needed to scope out my maintenance plan for next week. Turns out there's a bit of blazing needed, and one really big tree down across the trail, but other than that, not much in the way of obstructions...
Wednesday, 5-15 - 4.5 Miles (Trail) - Tillinghast Pond, West Greenwich, RI. This is a Nature Conservancy property, and consists of three main loops: the Pond loop, Coney Brook loop, and the Flintlock loop. I was able to complete the first two, then ran out of time. Awesome trails, narrow and smooth single-track through pine forest, and across some fields. Great views around the lake, but I really liked the Coney Brook loop and its rolling, twisty trail. Jonny pointed out that this property backs up to other protected areas, which adds to the potential for a long run scenario. There's 7 miles of trails available here, though, and it's not super technical stuff but the trails are clear and the views are outstanding.
Gobble gobble...
Start of the white trail. I seriously would never run
on roads ever if I had this available to me every day...
Orange trail, very cool place with the "Coney Cascade" as a closer...
Thursday, 5-16 - a.m. 4 Miles (Trail) - Pachaug/Tippecansett border hop, CT/RI. Some Arcadia/Pachaug forest property, smooth trails around the lake and then the real meat-and-potatoes part begins. Very steep, narrow trails, cliffs, caves and other assorted LOTR-type terrain...loved it. Jim's last workout before his BoldRDash race on Saturday, and fortunately the spill he took and the dive into the stream he did were on the back end of the run :)
No thanks! This was at the trail intersection. (Remember Fishbone? Fun band.)
Narrow and rocky, love it...
p.m. - 3 Miles (Trail) - Hoffman Evergreen Preserve, North Stonington, CT. Short run in this Avalonia property, which is very nice but has a sketchy trail on the back end that needs serious work. Otherwise, plenty of shade on what turned out to be a fantastic day. And now, we mow...
Hoffman Evergreen Preserve, nice and shady...
Friday, 5-17 - 3 Miles (Hike) - Trail Maintenance, Narragansett Trail at Lantern Hill. 2 1/2 hours of updating old blazes and painting new ones, and some light brush clearing. Great day for it, although I can't say it's easy schlepping a bucket full of paint, brushes and assorted gear up there. However, that section of trail is 100% blazed and clear! I was also pleasantly surprised when I got back to my truck to see about a dozen cars in the lot at the trailhead...
Saturday, 5-18 - 11 Miles (Trails) - Cockaponsett State Forest, Haddam, CT. I purposely waited until I was able to run this with Eric and Yvonne, as it's 16,000 acres, has a network of trails that criss-cross the main blue blazed trail, and they run it all the time. Local knowledge, yo! Met up a little after 9 and made the short drive to a spot Eric described as a warmup...and after a lovely downhill jog, our first climb kicked in.
With segments known as "Orange Crush" and "Billy Goat", I figured there'd be some hills, and YES! There were hills aplenty. We had over 900 feet of elevation gain in the time we were on the trails today, and navigated some pretty technical stretches as well. Great conversation, great run in the second largest state forest in CT, and plenty of room for more exploration there. Eric is an excellent tour guide - I'd have been totally lost in there, or would have kept strictly to the blue-blazed trail and missed some really cool sights. I read up on this place: the Cockaponsett Trail was a Civilian Conservation Corps project started in 1933-34, as part of FDR's "New Deal" initiative. It provided unskilled manual labor jobs (almost 300,000 at its peak) to young, unemployed men to assist their families during the Great Depression, and help develop conservation programs across the country. The stone steps pictured below were constructed in the 30's, are found in many places on the trail, and still as sturdy as they were 80+ years ago:
That's skill...
Eric and I (Eric reeeeaallly wants a WTAC singlet, Jeff!)
Yvonne and the sweatiest dude in Connecticut, May 18th...good times :)
Totally great time out there, and I found out that they run hills so much there, they seek out flatter places to run, and were surprised that I've been doing the opposite...fun to share different views of our sport, and what a really nice run!!! Epic day...
Sunday, 5-19 - 0 - Needed zero day after yesterday's gallop in the woods :)
The Adventures of Mike Crutchley: Having running shoes, will travel.
ReplyDeleteUnbelievable the variety of places you find to run!
Variety, as they say, is the spice of life...and I haven't gone more than an hour in any direction! The two places I ran today were within 10 minutes of my house. I have GOT to get back up to Beach Pond though, those trails were crazy on the north end of the lake...
ReplyDeleteI'm totally drooling over all of those photos of pretty trails. Hope to be back running soon!
ReplyDeleteYou guys have to hit me up when you're ready, the Pachaug/Tippecansett run was glorious...
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