Planning on doing some longer FKTs in the future and figured I would practice attempt submissions on something smaller first. This is a local trail to me and I've run portions of it on training runs but never the entire thing from point to point. Needed a long weekend run so I chose this route.
Temps in the upper 30's to start with abundant sunshine with some passing snow flurries. The start was a little slow due to trying to keep the feet dry on the unmaintained first half mile. After that I was able to settle in to my target pace of around 7:10 per mile. My hands felt the chill early so I slid my gloves on.
Pretty quiet day on the trail due to the chill. First encounter just a mile in was two women with two well behaved dogs that were happy to great me. About 4 miles in was a family of three with one happy dog. The next 10 miles or so went by without seeing a soul. I had to pee shortly in as usual but with the pace I was going to PR my 10 mile and half marathon distances so I waited until mile 13.3 to give in to natures calling. It had warmed up a few degrees at this point so off came the gloves. A mile later required a quick stop to remove a pebble from my left shoe. To my delight this was the only pebble of the run. Surprising for this crushed stone trail. It wasn't until I got closer to Emporium that I started seeing people on the trail again. A cute elderly couple all bundled up and then a father daughter duo on their bikes.
With about two miles left I realized I had picked a perfect pace as I was starting to feel the strain of it all but knew I could continue to push through. I had a couple gels on me and 16 ounces of fluids but only used one and maybe 4 ounces total. I tend to loose my rhythm when disrupting my breathing to ingest gels so I typically minimize that on these shorter runs.
All in all I was very pleased with the results and hope that some of my local and faster short distance running friends will get after this route.