Glasshouse Mountains trail run

I am no longer 'without trail run', this morning with the encouragement of Tess and Lizzle I completed my first one at the Glasshouse Mountains. What a great day and great location for it too.
I arrived a bit early, there was some confusion between the website start time of 7.30am and the mailed instructions of 8am, better safe than sorry I left the house at 6.30am and was up there by 7am, the joys of no traffic! Pretty soon the usual suspects began turning up and I was feeling like it was just going to be any other race, that was until the race director mentioned something about 'a lot of mud' and 'what to do if you go off a trail'...

It was a funny start, Clairie, Lizzle, Tesso and I thought we'd sprint for the first 100meters, then all but Claire thought better of it and pretty soon we'd lost Clairie and it was just us three. I was a bit worried I was going to hold Tess and Liz up but they seemed fairly happy running around 5.20's and just taking in the scenery.

We got to the first checkpoint at about 6km, the guys mentioned something about going straight for one km and then turning left 'la la la' I wasnt really listening, just taking it all in. If I had, well if any of us had been listening closer it would have probably prevented the detour we took (just visible on the map), luckily for us the following group called us back. There were a few tales of people who detoured for a kilometre or more though!

A couple of large rolling hills and we were at checkpoint 2 getting our photos taken, the hills really started to kick in at that point with the elevation rising to over 150meters, and the speed dropping off just as quickly. At one point Tess was leading and running up a steep hill and Liz and I were just walking behind her, they really were too steep to run and in places pretty wet, muddy and slippery too.



Around about 14km I was starting to tire and was probably running 20-30meters behind Liz and Tess and only catching up on the downhills. I kept telling myself that it didnt matter if I went slow, this was my first run over 12km since GC and it was only meant to be a training run, still that didnt really stop me from wanting to keep up. At checkpoint three we got our water filled up, it looked like we were about to climb the steepest hill yet, but when you got half way up it levelled off and we took a path away from the massive climb ahead.

For most of the second half it was just the three of us, with Tess and Liz making it look easy and me wishing I could go quicker! It was a great run though, so beautiful, we even stopped to get our picture taken with Mt Tibrogargan behind us.

2.12 of running time, although it seemed much quicker than that, the K's just flew by, even when I was getting really tired. I think this is definitely one for the calendar, though the other two musketeers made it the most fun, even waiting for me to catch up so we could all cross the line together :)