Trail Run today!

This afternoon i grabbed a buncha water, a liter of NUUN, and my trail shoes and headed out to Hanover, NH, to run along the Appalachian Trail. I usually run on the Vermont side, but today I wanted to shake things up a bit.

I readily found the trail head, nicely tucked behind the soccer practice fields
for Dartmouth College.
(why did blogger mess up my formating???) anyway.....
looking at the woods from the road, the hill is nothing to get excited about. weeeeellllllllll........as soon as the trail ducked into the treeline, it went up. i mean UP. and then up some more. a met two middle aged women on their way down, and they kinda gave me a crazy look (i have that effect on most people). i stopped to catch my breath and debate with myself about heading back down and just doing laps around the soccer field, but i trudged on. the trail mostly looked like this.....i was trying to keep up the old addage "run when you can, walk if you need to, crawl if you have to, but never, never stop". well..... i did stop, and not just to take pictures. i was getting my butt kicked on the ups. downs were find, flats were good, but the ups were mad! one of them has a ROPE with knots tied to a tree so that you can lug yer sorry carcass up. no joke. here's the picture. when i first looked at the picture, it looks FLAT. well....it isn't. on the way back, i had to use it to get down. honest.
anyway, i kept running, thinking that i was making pretty good progress. i checked  in with Teri (Garmin), only to find out that she was on a smoke break not tracking.  anything. she was still back....i dunno where, but NOT with me. when i look at the map she produced, it is if i was teleported along the trail. i HATE IT when this happens. i made sure that she was doing her damned job working properly, and ran along. things were going great, i was drinking at fairly regular intervals, and was able to take in the sights. i never knew that there were so many rocky cliffs 'back there.' if i was still into bouldering, it would be a fantastic place to spend a day. the trail started to level out, and my knees were happy. through the trees i could see a large open area, but couldn't see it very well. the trail turned toward it, and BAM! suddenly there was a wooden walkway going through a marsh. Cat-tails and such were about 8 feet tall. i trusted the bridge, and walked to the other side. once there, i looked at the time, and realized that i really needed to turn around and head back. i hadn't reached my goal, which was the road crossing, but my time hack was up, and i turned around. before i walked back across the walkway, I shot this picture.

All in all a great run. Using the accurate data from the return trip, it was a 6 mile out and back. next time i will leave earlier in the day, and be ready for dem dar hills!