Girls Gone Wildwood

Thanks to only having to work a half day on Friday and Susan's mother-in-law baby sitting, we were able to get our long run in for the week before I took off on my backpacking trip. We did ~11.25 miles in Forest Park. We started out at the Leif Erikson trail head, ran to ~4.25 mile to where Leif connects with Maple. We took a left on Maple and ran to Wildwood, which puts you at mile marker 12.75. We ran Wildwood to Wild Cherry which is between mile maker 8 and 7.75. We headed down on Wild Cherry to connect back with Leif and back to the car. We celebrated with very late lunch at our favorite food cart, Kitchen Dances. Saturday morning Karrla and I headed out towards Bull of the Woods wilderness for our first backpacking trip of the summer. We weren't quite sure which trail we wanted to do, but we were pretty sure we wanted to end up at Twin Lakes. We had originally thought we were going to start at the Whetstone tail head then after some debating we decided that we wanted to

Today we started our training for the crazy Lithia Loop trail marathon, there is something like 4000+ feet of elevation gain. I have been a little anxious this week about the whole thing, I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to fit all long training runs in with everything else I am doing this summer and fall, backpacking, climbing South Sister, Bail, etc. I also want to be able to do the majority of my long runs with Susan, who is a new mom and has her own summer plans. I finally decided I am going to take this one run at a time, and I know we are both dedicated to doing the marathon even if we have to walk it, and despite our busy lives we will find a way to fit in our runs. Our run today was 9.10 miles and 1400 feet of elevation gain. We started on the Wildwoood trail at the Pittock Masion, ran to the Dogwood trail to connect with Leif Ekikson. From Leif we ran to Aspen to connect back to Wildwood and back to the car. The cruel part of this loop is the last 2 miles is an