Sunday, October 28, 2007

Helping Out at the Bradbury Bruiser Trail Race


I had the honor of helping out my running buds Ian and Stephen with the Bradbury Bruiser 12-mile Trail Race this morning. I'm happy to report that it was a big success. The comments from the runners were overwhelmingly positive after tackling this challenging course on a day with nearly perfect weather.

The goal of this race was to bring more trail races to Maine, as well as raise money for where the race was held, Bradbury Mountain State Park. Many trail races are in NH and VT, but in our great state the quantity is very small, despite having some of the best terrain and scenery there is to far. Rather than sit back and complain about it, Ian and Stephen have led the charge to change that. The good news is, the success of today's race was just the springboard. More are planned. It was nice to see the vast majority of the 100 or so runners in today race were Mainers, indicating that local runners are indeed interested in trail racing.

As for my duties, I worked the registration tables with my friends, Kate and Chuck, and once the race began, we worked the finish line. Chuck manned the stopwatch as I wrote down the place numbers and times, while Kate updated the results board. Our neighbor and friend, John, was also there to help call out the runners numbers as they approached, which was a huge help. It all went very smoothly and without a hitch, not to mention it being fun.

As for my own running, I look forward to beginning to ramp up my mileage this week. I'll take slow steps to getting there, but should be back up to those much loved 60-80 mile weeks again by Thanksgiving.

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