Labor Pain is a 12 hour race put on by Pretzel City Sports at the Liederkranz German Singing & Sports Club in Reading, PA. It’s held the Sunday of Labor Day weekend on a “5 mile” trail course that is mildly technical by PA standards. The quotation marks there is because the course measured about…
Eastern States Stats and Stuff
There are a couple different types of people in this world. If you’re visually inclined, then you’ll want to read my race report which has 29 pictures of the race. That’s one way to describe this brutal course. For those like me who need to quantify things a bit more finely, the below charts will…
2021 Eastern States 100 Race Report
I guess the fourth time’s the charm as I had a simply incredible run this year. I was spotting rainbows and unicorns all over the course last weekend. I feel giving you the details of that run though may undersell the difficultly if this race. I’m sure the 49% of the field who dropped wouldn’t…
2021 Eastern States 100 Preview
Almost go time. This will be my fourth go at ES100. It’s been a long 2 year wait and I’m chomping at the bit to get back out there and run around Pine Creek. I’ll be interested to see how much of the course I remember. Even though I had already run it twice before,…
ES100 Training Blocks
I really wanted to add an adjective in the subject line like “effective” or “successful”, but I’m afraid of jinxing myself for next month’s race. Here’s a quick chart of some very high level stats summarizing the 100 days heading into each of my races. If you’re wondering why I picked 100 days and not…
2021 Catoctin 50K Race Report
Saturday was my third running of the Cat50K. 2019 (aka HellCat) was the last year in the old direction. Last year (aka CovidCat) was the first year starting from Manor Parking Area in Cunningham Falls State Park. The course is an out-and-back to the High Knob area in Gambrill State Park. My Garmin has measured this…
Monticello FKT
After my failed attempt at the Mason-Dixon Trail fastest known time, I decided to take a run at the Monticello FKT. This wasn’t something that’s been on my radar, but the logistics worked out fairly easily as it was on the way home from a family vacation in the Great Smokey Mountains. When combined with…
2021 Laurel Highlands 70M Race Report
Before I get into things, I want to start with a couple public service announcements. PSA #1 This course is straight up hard. Now the website and RDs don’t come out and sell this as an easy course, but the charts and course descriptions have this listed at 8,600 feet elevation gain and most of…
Laurel Highlands 70M Preview
Finally. I was signed up to run this race last year, however wasn’t able to because – well, COVID. The truth though is I’ve been waiting to run this race for much, much longer. It wasn’t too long after I got into running about 9 years ago that I learned about ultras. I was intrigued…
Advise for Future M-DT FKT Attempts
If you’re the type of person that only looks to successful people for advice, then you can stop reading here. On the other hand, if you believe that more can be learned from failure than success, then here’s what I’ve learned from my attempt to run the entire Mason-Dixon Trail. Some of this is from…