30 mile taper

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Susan planned out our long runs leading up to the Chuckanut 50k and for some reason she put a 30 mile run on the calendar 12 days before the race. I would never do anything like that before a race. 

We took the day off of work and had planned on doing an out and back on the Wilson River Trail, but I woke up to snow at my house and we had read there was already snow on the Wilson River Trail from the previous weekend. Not knowing how much more had accumulated, we decided not to drive 2+ hours round trip and to run in Forest Park instead. The obvious choice for 30 miles in Forest Park is all of Wildwood, but we didn't want to coordinate a shuttle Monday morning during rush hour traffic. While I was waiting on Susan to get to my house I cobbled together a 30 mile route from other routes in our blog. 
No snow on the trail!


 I decided on a route that started at 53rd and Wildwood, where the first 10 miles were to the Pittock and back, that way it gave us an opportunity to shed layers at the car if we wanted to. The trees were covered in snow, but the trail wasn't, it was perfect. When we got up to the Pittock it was so foggy we decided to skip the view of Portland and continue on. When we reached the car it was still cold enough and raining/snowing that we didn't remove any clothing, but just grabbed our extra food. 
Still cold!
We were running on Leif heading toward Maple when we started to hear construction noises and as we got closer to the Maple junction we saw that Leif was closed. At first we thought we would be able to go around it, but it became obvious quickly that wasn't going to happen, there was a backhoe at work and guys in hard hats blocking the trail. 
Leif Erickson is closed???
Sun!

We backtracked and ran up Firelane 2 to Wildwood to Maple. We did some running math and rerouted the route a bit, we were pretty sure we would end up with 30 miles. And you can always trust your math 18 miles into a 30 mile run. About the same time the sun started to peak out and stayed with us the majority of the rest of the run.
Sun and Susan, 2 of my favorite things.

Our run was nothing like what we originally had planned and we had to readjust several times, but it turned out to be an awesome run. When we got done, we went back to my house and my husband had made us pizza dough and even bought vegan cheese for Susan. We went and sat in the hot tub and drank beer while John made us pizzas. The best taper run ever. 
The plan b route:
53/ww - pittock : 5
pittock - apsen : 2.18
aspen - road : .23
road - thurman / lief : .50
leif - dogwood : .85
dogwood - wildwood: .34
ww - alder : .93
alder - leif : .84
leif - maple : 2.41
maple - leif : 2.73 (16.01)
leif - ridge: 2.06
ridge - ww: .34
ww - keil : 11.01
total 29.42

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