This one is for my beloved cat, Buffy. Today should have been our 5yr anniversary. Buffy witnessed almost my entire running journey, joining me the day after I thought I peaked with a sub-1:50 half marathon. With the pandemic, we became inseparable just as I was getting more into running.
I lost her on September 1st from a fairly fast decline to kidney failure. Every day still feels like a nightmare I’m unable to wake up from. Yet here we are, 50 days without her. Running a 50k to set an FKT on our special day seemed a fitting thing to do in her honor.
From an actual report standpoint, it was a lovely day! I managed to sneak this in between our first two atmospheric river events of the season. It was little warmer than ideal (about 60F for most of the run), but still nice! Minor wind. The trail was a little soggy and quite slick in a few places. There were 3 downed trees that were pretty easy to navigate over (or in the case of one, under).
One more difficult challenge was a proposed detour for about 1/2mi of the trail from 24th to 32nd streets just south of Carnation, where the suggested route took you out a busy road with minimal shoulder. I instead continued on the trail to the point where the trail was blocked and quite literally gone, then cut down to a side road to go parallel for about 30 meters, and then back up to where the trail started again. The cut back up to the trail was a bit sketchy, going through thorns and requiring both hands, but this seemed more honest to the route than taking the side road another 400m to the nicer climb back to the trail at 32nd. Hopefully it still counts! It seems similar to the bridge outage at 32nd from the very first FKT on this route. (I’ve included pics from a recon run the day before for this section)
Many thanks to my friends and family who met me at the finish!
This trail is absolutely gorgeous and I cannot recommend enough. The SVT has always been my go-to training spot for soft tissue injuries, and what is heartbreak if not a soft tissue injury? <3