Earlier this year, while I was busy taking Adam Wilcox’s FKT on the Carter Moriah Traverse, he knocked 13 minutes off my Pemi Loop FKT from 2011 to lower it to 6:14. For those that are not familiar with the Pemi, it is a rather strenuous 31 mile loop in the mountains of NH that includes 10k of climb, summits a whole pile of peaks, and includes several miles over terrain that most people find difficult to hike. One interesting aspect of the last two FKT’s on this trail are that Adam and I prefer to go different directions, he runs counterclockwise, I run clockwise. The weather looked good a few weekends ago, so I tried to get up there as early as possible and lower the FKT again. Cutting 13 minutes from my 2011 run was not going to be easy, that is about 2 miles at 50 mile pace, or one mile on the Pemi.
My legs felt good on the start over the bridge above the Pemi River and up the carriage road to the Osseo trail. Since I could only compare times with my previous FKT, I had listed my 2011 splits on my bottles. I made the summit of Flume, 5.2 miles in, at 61 minutes, which was about 4 minutes faster than 2011. While I was working hard on the climb, it was a reasonable effort that I hoped I could sustain. I enjoyed the technical but runnable miles on the Franconia Ridge, including some unexpected meetings with several trail running friends, and was at the summit of Lafayette 8 minutes ahead of my 2011 pace in 2:06. This was about 6 hour pace, which seemed a little aggressive, so I tried to back off and conserve some effort for the second half.