Trail Dawgs Half Marathon
Saturday the 28th was the annual Trail Dawgs Triple Crown event. At this event there are multiple races to choose from: a marathon (26.2 miles), a half-marathon (13.1 miles), a 10K (about 6 miles), a 5K (about 3 miles), and theTriple Crown which is the half-marathon, 10K, and 5K back-to-back-to-back. We participated in the half-marathon.
This was our third year running the Trail Dawgs half-marathon (nice cheesy picture of us after the race). Overall I’d say it was probably the best year so far. The first year was a decent run for Robert but was a royal pain for me. The first year it had rained for like two days before hand and was still raining in the morning. Plus this is a 13.1 trail run with two creek crossings, so that made it quite difficult. It sounds weak to point it out now, but I was just about to buy new sneakers before that race, so my old sneaks just could not get traction during that race, and there are a bunch of up hills – regardless it was very tough for me. The second year was better, well for me (my best time out of the three years). That year I had a decent run, actually a pretty good run, and Robert was all jacked up. He had just finished reading a book called Chi Running which has a neat theory on how to run better. So Robert was trying to apply the Chi Running techniques during the half-marathon, but hadn’t had enough time to practice the theories so it actually made his run harder on him. But, this year we basically both were on point. It turned out to be Robert’s best time of the three which is good. During the race I never felt completely drained and afterward we both were feeling pretty good, especially after we cracked into a bomber of Rogue’s 2006 Old Crustacean Barleywine and a Three Floyd’s Dreadnought Double IPA (only small beers, snicker). Trail Dawgs day is always a good time, just a long day overall.
After the race we decided it was time to go to Twin Lake’s Brewery and pick up some growlers. Unfortunately since it was an unplanned trip we didn’t have any empty growlers, so we had to pay $10 for two deposits on glass which made it so we bought 1 less growler, but we still got 2. We each sampled 3 beers while we were picking up our growlers. There new beer was available the Caesar Rodney Gold. It was good, just to similar to there other beers, what they need now is something ‘different’ for them. The Twin Lake’s sales man Matt Day joked that they were working on a sports beer, a la Gatorade beer or something, it was pretty funny.