Let's Catch Up

I haven't posted for a while, so, I'll catch you up with the last week and a half of events.
A couple of Sundays ago, on October 23rd, Kyle and I decided at the last second to do the Blue Springs Trail Marathon. We had also run it last year (as a training run), and thought it would be a great (and cheap) training day marathon. We had another intent, as well: to push/pull our newbie trailrunning buddy Jason Crosby, to his first marathon finish. Jason designed the shirt for the race. The pace we kept was slow, steady, and fun.
How I felt: I could've run about 30 to 45 minutes faster in the race, but that wasn't the intent...it was supposed to be a long, slow, distance training run. I'm happy with how my training is going...I barely felt the marathon after I was done, and ran hard & fast two days later, on a 10-mile trail run.
The night trail runs are great! We've had 9 people on average show up on both Tuesday and Thursday nights to run on rocky, rooty, and hilly trails. I even had a special Halloween Costume Trail Run last week. I called it the "Boo River Parkway Trail Run", and it was run on the Blue River Parkway Trails. James Barker showed up as Alex, with a tree branch stuck to his head, a vodka bottle in his hand, and a dog chomping onto his arm. "Good Ben" Reeves showed up as Little Red Riding Hood, red dress and all. Kyle Amos was Darth Vader, and I was a dead runner, wearing bib numbers "666" on the front, and "1313" on my back. Newbies Chris, Caleb, and Doug showed up, as well. Good fun and a fast trail run. We ran the 7+ miles of dirt trails and water crossings in 1:02! Not bad. I had brought some appropriate homebrew for afterward: Drive-By Malt Liquor and Bitch-Slap Black Ale.
We ran long the next morning (Saturday) at Shawnee Mission Park, then had a trail maintenance day on Sunday at Wyandotte County Park. Five of us worked for over 5 hours adding some decent singletrack trails at WyCo.
I ended up getting strep throat from my grandson (or son), and missed almost a full day of work on Monday. The antibiotics are kicking in, and I had my first run since Saturday on Wednesday night. We ran on the paved streamway trails for the WNR. We met at 103rd & State Line, and Jeff P and I ran for about 6 miles. It felt good to run again. We had a little tailgate party afterward. I hit the weights this morning. Back into the swing of things, again! I'm well on my way to another training buildup for the Rocky Raccoon 100-mile Trail Run in February. It will be the 4th year in a row that I've run in the Rocky Raccoon 100.