If By Win, You Mean Dominate

This weekend, Helen and I participated in our first Double Trouble – another in the Pretzel City family of trail races. The terrain wasn't as hard as Half-Wit (or Ugly Mudder, which is the same terrain as Half-Wit, just in the other direction), probably not as hard as the Wissahickon Trail Classic, either - but significantly harder than Tyler.

It's an odd race. The course is a 15k (aka 9.3 mile) loop. You can race it once, you can race it twice, depending on if you want to go 15k (single trouble) or 30k (double trouble).

To be honest, I'd like to do a 30k trail race, but a two loop version of the race we just did didn't really appeal to me. It did appeal to Helen, but I kind of talked her out of it, which I feel kind of bad about now. Because the guy who won the men's 15k race finished 2nd in the 30k, and the guy who finished 3rd in the 15k won the 30k. Helen could've one-upped them, though. I'm sure she could have won both.

Obviously, this wasn’t the first race Helen won. But I can't remember her dominating a race like this one. The second woman didn't finish until four and half minutes after Helen.

I was generally pleased with my own race. I spent most of it alone - I finished 14th overall (although it's kind of complicated – for reasons I won't go into, some of the 30k racers who finished ahead of me count in the 15k rankings and some don't). I was around a minute behind the 13th place guy, and half a minute in front of the 15th place guy. My main goal in the second half was to not get lost. Mission accomplished! I really tried to keep my focus. I don't want to jinx myself, but I've now gone four straight trail races without getting lost. Amazingly, the races I've not gotten lost in now outnumber the races where I have gotten lost.

And Helen wasn't alone in bringing home some hardware. I managed to bring home the heavily coveted 5th place M 30-39 award. Maybe this whole turning-forty thing isn't so bad.