Bradbury Run and New Shoes

Another beautiful day today. Blue skies and warm temps. Gorgeous! Snowman and I had decided that we would head to Bradbury today to get in a long trail run. The park was quiet as we donned our YakTrax and headed out on the Perimeter Trail. Although relatively small, the park has a great system of trails and being close to both Portland and Brunswick, gets a lot of use. The Perimeter Trail was nicely packed down by what looked like walkers, snowshoers and a few adventurous skiers. We had to jump a few water bars and open streams, so the skiing would have been interesting, but it was great running. With the warm temps, the snow was a bit soft but still pretty solid and we enjoyed our jaunt along the edge of the park. We split off from that trail to head up to the "summit", an open ledge area overlooking the surrounding fields and woods, very picturesque, and then back down toward the parking lot. The flora and fauna highlight of the run was that Snowman, in the lead, spotted a pileated woodpecker up in a tree. We watched it for a while as it hopped up the tree trunk and headed out onto a branch, where it called out its song. Neat!

That loop got us about 42 minutes of running, so we headed across the street, which leads out to a wide snowmobile trail that heads through hill and dale into Durham and then eventually to the Androscoggin River. Ian and Jamie, two ultra trail runners in the area, both blogged about running along this snowmobile trail toward the river earlier this month. We did not get that far, needless to say, but ran for a ways along the trail before turning back. There had been a fair amount of recent snowmobile activity along the trail, but despite that, or maybe because of that, the snow was a strange texture, sort of loose and granular, all churned up. I think because I was getting tired at this point, it seemed harder than it should have been, and at the hour mark, I declared I was ready to turn around. We finished with a run of 1:16, which we figured was about 7.5 miles. Not too shabby! My legs are definitely feeling it, but it's a good tired!

After showering, eating lunch and packing up to head up to Great Glen to meet our friend Ghost, who we hiked with on the AT in 2005, for dinner and stay over to race Nordic Meisters tomorrow, we headed down to Portland to the Maine Running Company store to try on some Inov-8 shoes that we had heard about. We had gone down to the store last weekend, but they did not have our size so the nice woman on the floor indicated that she was planning an order anyway and would order our sizes and set them aside so we could have a chance to try them on. This company is really interesting, and several of the people in the trail running community around here, use various Inov-8 shoes. Snowman had done a fair amount of research and was really excited to try them out. The shoes are light but sturdy and a bit different in the amount of structure around the ankle, etc, but are made for trail/mountain running. Needless to say, we both walked out with a new pair of Inov-8 Roclite 315 shoes, and are very excited to start using them this spring on the trails!