Ugh

In sickness and in health, 'til death do you part.

Sadly, in the past three weeks, I've had much more of the former. It started off with the hurt foot I had from my escapade running a half marathon and then covering 35 miles on the SHT. By the time I would have next been able to get on the SHT, I was coughing and wheezing my way through a cold—which morphed in to a sinus infection. That's kept me grounded for the past week. Much of that time my teeth and jaw and head would hurt when I ran; every time my foot hit the ground. This is not conducive to hiking.

So, no hiking. I think I'm over everything, but it has not been my month. I might hit the trail next weekend for a ways, but with shorter days and snow coming, it might be nearing the end of hiking season for me. Which is not all that bad, it means ski season is right around the corner!

(And yes, if I have a choice between driving four hours to hike on the SHT versus four hours to ski at ABR, I'm probably going with the latter.)

Distances

I've spent some time putting together a table of distances on the SHT. Basically, the Superior Trail Guide publishes each hike as a "section" which often includes an approach trail or some other such trivialities. When you are reeling off three or four "sections" a day it makes it a pain to calculate mileage between different points.

I searched online quite a bit and didn't find anything, so I put something together myself. A chart of distance on the Superior Hiking Trail. There might be a couple problems as some of it was entered kind of late at night (and in some other cases, the SHT guide was not very helpful with its descriptions) but we'll do with it what we can.

I think it's helpful. It makes it easy to see if I am going to do something easy, hard or stupid.

Next SHTing is probably the weekend of the 11th to 12th. There are two reasons it might not happen. One is weather; there is some chance of lots of rain in coming few days which would put a damper on the hiking. The other is me being stupid. You see, there is a marathon up in Wisconsin that weekend. 26 miles, downhill 600 feet, on a rail bed (less knee killing). Why, in god's holy name, would I run this? Well, I sort of want to run Boston. By sort of I mean that at some point in my life, having grown up on the route, I want to run it. The main issue? I have to run a 3:10 marathon — that's 7:20 miles — to qualify.

Recently, I've been doing that. I raun 6:50s over 9+ miles a couple weeks ago, 8:00s in a half trail marathon on a brutal course, and 7:00s yesterday in a bit of a time trial. My main issue right now is some residual foot pain from aforementioned shenanigans a couple weekends ago. If that goes away, and I am having good runs and think I can run a 3:10, I might go for it. Then I'd have to start planning a trip home in April.