Girls Gone Wildwood

I've heard of Mary's Peak 25k/50k/50mi for a few years, but it hasn't been on my radar as it's not near a mountain or widely known as particularly scenic. This year, with our "A race" in mid-August, the 50k stuck out to us a a good training race with decent climbing (about 5,000 ft), only a two hour drive from home. Ready to go at the start Ann drove down in her van to camp, and I drove down with my family to spend the night in Corvallis. As is customary, Ann picked up the race packets for both of us since I didn't make it in time. In a surprising move, however, I had my family drop me off early at the start at Blodgett Elementary School for fear of always being late, and I was one of the first people there. The race director was hanging out and very friendly. He made a point to chat with everyone, and offered his cell phone number in case we needed anything during the race. We loaded up on two school buses and made the slow, windy drive on a na

What do you do when you have a day off of work to go on a long run and all the trails you want to run on are covered in snow and you don't want to run on the same old trails close to the house you run on every weekend? You head to the coast! Which is exactly what we did.  The forecast called for rain, but it didn't rain until we got back to the car. We were blessed with sun, blue skies and amazing view of the coast line throughout our whole run. Cedar even got a little beach time. We had planned on running ~25 miles, but had to cut it a little short because of evening commitments. The Oregon Coast trail doesn't have as much elevation gain as some of the trails in the Gorge or Mt. Hood, but I it has tons of tree roots and slick rocks, which can make it hard to run on at times. I think we ended up running around 20 miles. It was still a fantastic day and left me excited for all our adventure runs this summer.