My Longest Run To Date

Sun and fun today. We had snow yesterday, but thank goodness it cleared up and was a pretty nice day today. Well I took advantage of it. Mckayla had some testing for a gifted student program up on the east side today. We couldn’t be there with her and it took about 90 minutes so Les dropped me off at the guard station at Millcreek and went to run some errands with the other two. I took off up the canyon at a very easy warm up pace and then after about 3/4 mile got to the Rattlesnake Gulch/Pipeline trailhead. There I took off up the trail, I felt good, still a little tight and at this point it had been all up hill. About a mile up the trail it forked off and I took the pipeline trail opposite of the grandeur peak trail (will have to go back and do that one sometime though). The trail flattened out and I felt great! Nice smooth pace at this point and it curved around the mountain to reveal a great view of the city and got even better as I got out to the point. The entire time along this trail I was thinking of my approach since I was going to meet Les at the New Salt Lake Running Co. at I-80 and 700 East. If I took off down back to Millcreek it would take a while, so I decided to bushwack it down the face of the mountain towards 3300 South.
Bushwacking it was a bit of a challenge, but a lot of fun. It was the north side of the mountain so I had some post holing in deep snow to deal with. A lot was just sliding down the snow on my butt until the brush really thickened. From here I was just following deer tracks around to get to a trail on the other side of the gorge. Finally I got down (a long half mile or so). Back to smooth running on trail for another half mile and I came out in the neighborhood above wasatch near 3300 south.
Now to fight the road for 5 miles. I ran down 3300 south to 2300 east then down 2700 south to 1000 East and I felt great until about the last half mile. Towards the end I could feel my ankles tightening up and my right knee was sore as was my left hamstring. I had taken a gu about half way through and had very little water so that didn’t quite help the whole situation.
All in all though it was a pretty good run and I am glad I was able to pretty much beat the 6 mile barrier that had been hanging over me. Now my long is 8 miles!! what a blast!! Sometimes it is great to just go out and run and not worry about pace, time, or distance. That is exactly what I did today and I felt great with it! See my map below.