Wanted to take a crack at this beautiful route and though this would be the last weekend until the Fall where the temps were not crazy. Started at 5:22 this morning at the MA border and did the north to south variation, and the first 20 miles were lovely and cool! Between 45-60 degrees. Made a couple small navigational errors in the Avon area that added a couple tenths of a mile. The section where the trail ends and you have to run on the busy streets wasn't the best but it provided lots of opportunities to get aid for a self supported effort. Cumberland Farms were my go to aid station. By the time I got back onto the trail the temps really started to rise and it got hot. By mile 35 I had to start doing a walk and run protocol. As I got closer to the coast the temps started to cool back again and I was able to run for longer stretches of time.
The time I considered the end of the fkt was the Hillhouse Ave in New Haven entrance to the bike path on Yales campus since the last 330 ft to Temple Street is closed while under construction. I believe this to be a fair variation on the current route as the extra 330 ft would add negligible time and it is closed currently. For my self supported ftk attempt I beat the current unsupported time by 3 hours.
I continued on to the coast of CT, an extra mile and a half or so, to go full border to border. My time on that was 8:05:40.