flying with the wings

okay...so at the start of the day, i thought for sure that the nokia n82 and the nifty sport tracker software were going to be the highlight of my workout.  funny that it turned out to be the one thing that failed miserably and it was the SHOES (gee, it's a salomon promotion, go figure) that were the highlight.

up at zero dark thirty and out on the road by 4am, i rolled up to the forest service road just before 6am and met lambert and judy.  we all hopped into lambert's truck and headed up to the fobes trailhead.  it was a brisk 33 degrees, so i bundled up a bit.  i started up the sport tracker software and we were off.  we had 15-18mi on the pacific crest trail planned, so i was running a huge risk of running in the xt wings for that distance without breaking them in first. 

the first mile and a half were a hard uphill haul.  no warm up here, it was scrape your nose steep.  what better way to shock your body into being warm, though, eh?  before we knew it, we were up on the pct and heading south toward lion peak.  after about another mile, judy turned around and headed back down the mountain since she had an 8am cut off time.  lambert and i continued on, constantly headed up.  ever time we made a quick stop for bio reasons or to re-fuel, i'd check the phone to see how it was doing.  it seemed to be recording the workout just fine, but the thing i did notice was that the battery was being eaten alive.  after an hour, the battery was almost completely gone, so i shut the phone off.  after review, i think the problem was that there was spotty cell coverage and the phone was working hard to establish a connection.  i'll try the sports tracker with the wireless option off next time and see how it does.

  i snapped a couple photos at the trail intersection with the nokia and realized that self portraits are not it's forte.  it kept focusing on the things behind me.  haha...i guess the phone knows best, eh?

lambert and i cruised on, having a blast of a time running along and just constantly marveling at the beauty around us.  each new summit provided us with a new amazing view.  i commented at one point that there was too much world for me to take in.

the shoes were brilliant.  they were stable, gave good arch support and were lightweight enough to allow for a quick leg turnover without fatigue.  i hardly noticed the trail through the sole.  the pct in this section is fairly rocky, and not once did i 'feel' any of the rocks. 

after a couple hours of running, we came to the top of the cedar springs trail and decided to head on a little further down the pct and then turn around and head down the cedar springs trail and back to my car.  this seemed like a good option for time, since it would put me back at my car when i needed to be there and give lambert a couple more miles as he ran back up to his truck.  we estimated that we'd be looking at somewhere around 14 miles for the run with that option.

well, the pct has this magic way of foiling the best laid plans.  our short out and back before heading down ended up turning into several more miles than we'd planned and next thing you know, we're dropping down cedar springs trail with only minutes left before i need to be back at the car...and something like four miles left to go.

fortunately, we hit road pretty quick and we were able to run much faster than on the trails.  i'll tell you what, though, the singletrack down cedar springs was so worth all the climbing we'd done earlier.  it was great to let the legs fly and do all the fancy footwork through bolder strewn creek beds and along the grassy meadows.

the salomon xt wings were great on the road, too.  we were really flying on the downhill and i was able to run comfortably in them at a 7:20 pace.  i had a slight hot spot develop on my instep, but after removing the sock, realized that it was because of a bite in the sock fabric, not the shoes.  on all the fairly technical downhill and climbing, the shoes never let my foot slip in the shoe and the toebox was plenty wide enough for my feet.  in comparison to my sauccony trail shoes or my vasque trail shoes, i'd say they're better than both.  better on the toes than my vasques and more solid and better fitting than the saucconys.

anyway, lt and i hit the main road and ran the 2 miles back to my car for a total of 18+ miles.  we were out on our feet for just under five hours (that includes all stops) and all the gear held up incredibly well.  i'll beat the shoes up some more and give a more detailed report at a later date, as well as the phone, but at a first pass, everything worked pretty groovy.

once again, lambert took some fun photos so stop by the scth website and take a look at them.

soundtrack for this post
	lick: hipsters: wax:	Fisherman's Blues The Waterboys The Best Of the Waterboys '81 '90

Posted by jeff at May 11, 2008 10:06 AM