Triple Lakes Marathon

Frank and I set off for Greensboro again this year to run the Triple Lakes Marathon/40 Miler. This year we opted to run the marathon distance instead of the 40 as our training did not warrant a 40 mile effort. (but it did an 18 hour, 52 mile run last weekend????) Anyway, I'm really glad that we decided to do "just" the 26.2 miles. It was tough. The course was very runnable but rooty. I fell twice and Frank feel once. It remined my of Rocky Raccoon. The fact that it's so runnable makes it even tougher. My goal was to run under 6 hours and I thought that would be good enough to capture my age group award as well, since last year the winning time in my age group was over 7 1/2 hours! Well, I did squeeze in in just under 6:00 hours (I came in and was passed by the first women running the 40 mile event as we ran around the little pond just before the finish! How humiliating!) Oh well, maybe I was old enough to be their mother) Anyway, a ringer from Florida decided to try a trail marathon for her 50th birthday and decided she could win this was judging from the previous years results. She's a road racer and looks really fast and guess what, she was. She ran the marathon in 5:07 so needless to say she whooped my butt but I was still very happy with my time and pleased with my effort, especially since I'm still recovering from "running" 52 last weekend. I do feel that my endurance is finally improving and I'm looking forward to more respectable times. Frank won his age group so he was very happy. He ran 4:49 and was thrilled with his effort since neither one of us are where we want to be but looks like he's well on his way. (plus he only ran 22 last weekend. I'm looking forward to checking the results as there were others running the 40 today that also ran the 24 hour last weekend.
I'd like to run it again next year, but it will depend on the Hinson Lake 24 hour run. I definately want to run the whole 24 hours so is Triple Lakes is the following weekend again, it just won't work.
Tomorrow an update on our bookcases. Very interesting. I'm too tired to write about it now.