Viking Dash ½ Marathon Trail Run


This morning, I was in Lowell, NC for the Viking Dash ½ Marathon Trail at George Poston Park. Not sure if I consider the ½ marathon distance as dash but maybe others do. Anyway, based on what I have read the Viking Dash Trail race series is a relatively new series. From what I understood talking to others today, this was the first Viking Dash race at Poston Park for them. With any new race location, there is learning curve. A race director can go over a course numerous times, and still, the moment he dumps several hundred runners on to it, issues that he never realized come right to the top.

This happened to us this morning. We were on the Laurel Hill Loop which is blazed with pink paint. We came up to an intersection on the backside of this trail, and someone had blazed pink paint on the other side of the intersection which leads on to the Foundation Loop. Those leading us didn’t catch it, and we went on to the Foundation Loop. Soon, questions were being raised if we were still on the right trail. No one was certain of what to do so when we came to a service road. As if making this first mistake wasn’t enough, we had to compound it by following the service road. Long story short, we meandered around until we stumbled back on to the Laurel trail. This time, I took over leading us back over the course that we had just run. This time, when we came to the same intersection, I slowed and looked around. The pink blazed trees led off to the right so this time, I turned right and everyone else followed. After this, I led us through the rest of the Laurel Loop and back on to the red blazed trail. Here the eventual winner took over and soon pulled away from all of us. After this bump in the road, I no further trouble over the 2nd or the 3rd loops. I knew where I was going.

Making this a bit interesting to ponder, several weeks ago when I first pulled up the course maps, I noticed that they were running much of the trail system backwards. Not that this is an issue, they just have to mark the course a lot more. I knew this because I ran the Wicked Root 10 miler last year on these same trails. I remember the blazing of the trees with paint. The paint is on the side of the tree that I am running towards which make a ton of sense. Right?  Running the course backwards, I would not be able to see the paint until I passed. On Friday, the race director sent out and email with our prerace instructions. He included a course map link so being a good runner, I clicked on it. To my surprise, the course was entirely different. Instead of 2 loops backwards, we would be running 3 loops forward, and running in the expected direction for seeing the trail blazings. This was probably smart move on their part. Otherwise, we still might be wondering around Lowell, NC.

To share some of the back story here, I didn’t have this race on my calendar. I happened to be browsing Facebook when I also it. Running made good sense for a couple of reasons. The race was an easy drive from my house, and the race presented a way to hop on a different trail for some miles. While I am a big fan of the WWC trails, mixing up them with other trails make my runs a lot more interesting.

Moving to wrap this up, I was happy finishing 2nd overall in 2:11:15 and bringing home this super nice Viking goblet. However, I was jealous of the 10k awards which were these huge knives. They were awesome looking. I would consider going back to run the 10k for knife.

For those that might be considering this race series, the race shirt was okay. Likely, it will go in to my closet never to be worn. I got a large, but when I looked at it later, it was a Viking large not runner large. The shirt is huge on me.

There is one thing that I would like to call out here which I liked a lot. After the race, they had baked potatoes. After running 14+ miles, I had two of them, and they tasted awesome. I guess that I was hungrier than I thought.

That’s it for this week. Back to training next week.


Kickin’ up tail mud this weekend,

The Cool Down Runner

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