Juddmansee.com

Brian:
Week 11 training update! Swim: 1750m. Bike: 119.2mi. Run: 10mi. Highlight: New swim PR for 100m, first 100 mile bike week since 1999, awesome 10mi run with Su today. Lowlight: Continued lack of motivation to start my workouts. This week: Recovery and vacation!

Sunday – Huge swim progress. Swam 6×100 speed sets today all faster than my previous best 100 time. 1:33 to 1:38/100 vs. 1:42 previous record.

Thursday – Nice 23 mile ride through Byfield, Rowley, and Newbury, but even with 8 years in this house I still get lost on some of the curvy back country roads. I also found a very pretty road that I should never bike on again because for several months of the year it appears to be part of the marsh. Welcome to New England!

Susan:
Decided to focus on work the week before vacation, so only got in a Thursday run during the week, but it was speedy! With my longer Saturday run and Sunday 10 miles with Beej, I still made it to over 5 hours of running. I definitely need to do more hills.

Please indulge a more detailed description of the 3- hour trail run in the rain with Bill and Scott. I’ve enjoyed working and running with Bill and was looking forward to a longer run at trail pace. Scott has done several Ultra races and had plenty of good stories and advice. Bill and he were good-natured and well-paced company through swamp, mud, and navigation challenges we encountered. I now feel ready for May.

We did part of the Bay Circuit Trail, starting at the “P” on Linebrook Road we ran south through Willowdale State Forest to Bradley Palmer State Park. We crossed the footbridge and decided to do a little hill work on our way to the contact station and out to the road. At this point we were already thankful for maps! We headed up Highland Road to Appleton Farms. This began the wet sloggy part of the run, over the pasture and then up Pigeon Hill. The monuments were a bit eerie in the grey and rain, so if anyone wants to shoot a horror film, we have some ideas. We continued on to the Pingree Reservation. You should note at this point the amount of wetlands in the area – we had several slogs through grassy muddy marsh, so perhaps a drier day would be better. There were horse jumps along part of the trail to keep things interesting. At this point we turned around and headed back northwest, taking a straight line through Bradley Palmer and back up to the car at Willowdale.