Alternate Incline trail run

When I went to bed Saturday night I thought we were all set to run the North Lake Whatcom trail for our Sunday - fun day outing, but when my husband laid out our Happy Trails Chuckanut Mountains map on the dining room table Sunday morning I knew he had other plans.

We have signed up for two road races this spring besides the Montana Spartan race in May. In April we'll do the Whidbey Island half marathon & in June we'll do the NODM (North Olympic Discovery marathon). We'll be in the walking division for the marathon, we'll be walk/running the event. I'm too slow to make the running cut off time. The walk cut off time is 7 1/2 hours, hopefully I'll be able to complete it in that amount of time. My husband will be doing all 3 races with me.

Sunday morning we drove to the Blanchard Hill trail head off of Barrel Springs road to begin our run. We started walking up the road to get to the Alternate Incline trail head, as I have mentioned before I use the walk/run method for my training. I've found it works the best for me.

We came to the trail head after about 1 mile. Then we began running UP. We ran as long as we could then walked till we caught our breath. We did this until we reached the trail junction sign.

We took a left on the Lizard/Lily lakes connector trail and ran for about 1/4 of a mile to add a little more distance to what we thought we'd go for the day. The trail was beautiful with moss, ferns, mushrooms and huckleberry bushes lining it. We then returned to the junction and followed alongside Lizard Lake. We tried to go right along the shore for a short distance but there really wasn't a trail so we went up a short distance through the brush and over a few downed trees to join the real trail. We then continued on to the British Army trail running as much as we could and only walking to catch our breath or manage our way down some tricky areas.

The British Army trail connects to a logging road that takes you down to the trail head parking lot. We ran around 4 miles on the logging road to the first parking lot. It was a bit tricky because of the size of rocks used on the road. They are larger than the usual logging road gravel and we couldn't look around much because we were trying to finish without spraining an ankle.

We have switched to Hoka running shoes and boy was I glad I had them on, the extra cushioning really helped on those rocks.

The road was covered with Big Leaf Maple leaves. I took a picture with my feet to show how large the leaves were. I wear a size 8 shoe.

When we got to the parking lot my husband stopped where our car was parked. He had completed 8.35 miles. I continued running to the lower parking lot, he drove down and picked me up. My total was 9.55 miles. 

A very good day on the trails with my training partner.

Endomondo stats:

9.55 total miles

Maximum altitude - 1991 feet

Minimum altitude - 643 feet

Total ascent - 1307 feet

Total descent - 1618 feet (farther down because I continued past our starting point)