Squak / Tiger / Cougar trips

I was getting a little nervous that I have not trained hard enough for Primal Quest, so I promised myself that I would do 10,000 vertical feet of exercising this past Saturday, as this is our expected average daily gain and loss for each of the ten days of the event.

I got off to a good start when I volunteered to help with the Northwest Trail Run Squak Mountain half-marathon. Eric assigned me to mark the course, which is incredibly hilly as it goes up, down and around Squak Mountain. I spent more time hiking than running, but with all the course markings and the extra gallon jug of water that I carried to the summit for the aid station, I felt satisfied with my slow pace. 3600 feet already finished! This was actually the first time that I've been to Squak Mountain, and I'm definitely coming back. There are a lot of good trails and hills here.

After I finished the half-marathon course, I headed over to Tiger Mountain and pulled out my mountain bike for a trip up to Poo Poo Point and back. On my way back down, I hit the single track on Iverson Railroad; otherwise I stayed on fire roads. At the parking lot, I met Peteris, who wanted to do it again. Why not? He took me on some side roads and trails that I had not explored before. Then we did a final lap up East Tiger as far as the Preston trailhead. Snow stopped us a hundred yards short of the singletrack; I was in no condition at this point to brave the techincal downhills that it provided, so we headed back down to the parking lot.

Mountain biking is a lot easier on my body than trail running when hills are involved. My body was fatigued, but my legs were still feeling ok, so when Andrew Feucht said he wanted to do a long trail run at Squak the next day, I said "sign me up".

Andrew and I started at Sky Country trailhead on Cougar and started the usual SRC loop. I lagged behind, as my body did not seem to want to kick itself into gear after the big workout the day before, but eventually, Andrew kindly slowed down to my pace. We dropped down the connector trail to Squak, then we struggled up and over Squak, down the other side, and then back up and over again. We both mostly walked back up Wilderness Creek trail coming back up Cougar Mountain, but gained a lot of steam when it flattened out near the finish. We forewent our plan to include DeLeo Wall and Quarry trail, however. Andrew got in a 20+ mile run to prepare him for the North Face Endurance Challenge next week, and I managed to survive the weekend.

I finished a solid weekend. The good news is that I finished 35 miles of running, almost 40 miles of mountain biking, and logged about three vertical miles during the weekend. The bad news is that at Primal Quest, I have to keep doing that for 10 days straight rather than just a day and a half. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.