Self-cleaning...

This struck me as kinda odd.



be careful with the courtesy flush...

Zumbro Bottoms

I decided I wanted to hit some trails this weekend and decided to take a trip to Zumbro Bottoms. Yes, this is where the Zumbro 100 will be held in April... and no, this doesn't mean I'm training for it. Though I do plan to be there as a volunteer.

It was a beautiful day to be out. Some of the trails were pretty sloppy, but that kinda adds to the fun. If you want to get an idea of where in the world this place is, and where some of the trails are... check out this motion-based link. Feel free to ignore all the gory details about my run. And to see how things looked out there this weekend, here are some of the pictures I took.

Test: Capitol

Wayne Nelson
- from treo

FANS 12 ??, Afton

Well, my plan to check out the FANS course didn't work out very well.

On Thursday I wanted to stay up after work for a presentation at Midwest Mountaineering, and I figured I'd kill time by running around Lake Nokomis. I wanted to see if I could get around a couple times and try to project forward to June to see if I could do that for most of 12 hours. What I've heard is that the course is really quite easy and the hard part is in going around and around and around and around (you get the idea) on a flat, hard surface... hour after hour... in the heat of the day, and for the 24-ers all night long.

Turns out I killed most of my time in stop-and-go traffic on 94. And then the course turned out to be quite difficult and amazingly cold. Not at all what I was expecting. My thought about FANS 12 is that maybe I could use that to bridge the gap between 31 miles and 50 miles. Seems like it would be a good experience and good for my confidence if I could pull off 40 miles without injury. After Thursday I'm looking at maybe 12 miles. I'll need to think about this some more.

Things probably would've gone a little better if I had done Thursday's run in snowshoes. Thankfully I was able to do that on Sat, at Afton State Park. Thank you to Alicia, Tom and Nancy for hosting a Fat... um, an informal snowshoe and potluck event on Sat. The sun was out, there wasn't much wind, and thanks to Thur there was plenty of good snow. And then eating and hanging out afterwards was great as you would expect. I thought my snowshoeing days were over for this winter, but I'm glad this worked out. Thank You to the organizers and everyone that showed up.