Due to weather the Brighton long course was changed to the short course at the last minute. Whew. I remember feeling kind of stressed and tired that day. Getting to Brighton was difficult due to accidents on the freeway followed by construction in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Almost everybody arrived just in time and frazzled.
I’m glad that the organizers relied on professional resources to determine the safety of the course during a thunderstorm. The Brighton long course does summit a peak and is one of the more aggressive of the runs, but we were averted and sent back down the mountain. I finished the short course in 1 hour, 1 minute. To me, personally, that felt like legitimate trail running. I was thrilled and pleasantly surprised by the result of this race that ended up being the short course.
As we are now over halfway through the trail running season, it’s time to take a pause and reflect on how things have gone. At this point, I have completed 6 Wasatch Trail Run Series runs and one Cirque Series for a total of 7 races completed. At the time of this writing I had to skip yet another due to recovery from an injury from glissading down the Mount Timpanogos glacier. Obviously I haven’t been able to run them all, which I figured would happen due to other obligations. I also didn’t realize that I was going to miss two of the races this year due to simply needing a break from doing too much. While I’m still pursuing the 9-jacket race club and still have one more Cirque Series to complete this season, I’m already contemplating what I can do to be better prepared in future seasons. Does this mean more wintertime training, fewer personal hikes in between scheduled races, or cherry picking my races to run fewer or just doing the short course instead of the long? I have some more time running this year to decide…stay tuned. ~Clark 🙌🏻