Haven't been blogging as much lately. I've been busy helping people rebuild their houses from all the fallen ice covered limbs. Sounds noble, doesn't it? Actually, I have had tons of calls for repairs, and have been pulling some long days surveying and giving estimates for repairs. Now if the insurance gods are kind, I will have a profitable January.
My last long run of 2007 was with my buddy Alex down in the Ouachita Mountains in SE Oklahoma. We got up early (4-ish) and drove to Talamena State park, parked, and ran about 25 miles on trails.
The first 12 miles or so were on the Old Military Road trail, which is really not a road at all....maybe a mule road, and was mostly all downhill, mile after mile of very nice runnable single-track. Most of the trails during this section were covered with pine needles from tall trees that seemed to reach the sky.
Then, we had a long climb, and ended up on about 2 miles of boulders that had saw briers growing up betweenst them. Lots of scratched up legs for sure. After crossing the Talemena Skyline Drive, we started down into Dead man's Gap.
Legend claims that years ago, some horse thieves were captured near this hollow, and were hanged right there on the spot. This tree is the very one where the hangings occurred.
The last 8 miles were up and down, with great views of the distant mountains and plains.
This was one tough run, and took us almost 9 hours, even though we ran around 90% of it. We trudged up the hills, but ran all the flats and downhills. I have talked a lot about running the entire length of the Ouachita Trail, and maybe helping put on an ultra there. As tough as the Ouachita portion of our run was, I wonder how feasible this would be. Running all day and all night would wipe me out mentally as well as physically. An all night outing might lend itself to hallucinations like this....
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