25 miles, 13:00 pace (roughly)

I meet Brian at 5:15 this morning to make our drive up to Mohican. We exchanged running stories and experiences and talked about Mohican. We arrived at 7:50 just in time to get ready and start our run. We were met at the covered Bridge by Kim, Regis, Tom and Ted. After exchanging pleasantries and a group picture, we began our journey. We all stayed relatively close together for the blue loop which is a scenic four mile loop. Little Lyon Falls and Big Lyon Falls were very cool, even though there wasn’t much water flowing. From talking to Regis and Kim it has been a very dry spring in Mohican, and as the day went on this became very evident. As we began the large 21 mile red-green section the pack began to separate. Regis Brian and Ted took the lead as Kim, Tom and I were more than content to stick back. It seemed that each mile we would come to a spot and Kim would comment on how muddy it usually is, but with the lack of rain the trail was very dry. There were only a few times we got our feet wet. If it stays like this until race day it should really help us out. This run really confirmed what I had already suspected; there are plenty of hills and plenty of opportunities to slow down my pace. We kept roughly a 13 minute pace throughout the run, including any stops we made. This pace felt very comfortable. When we finish I felt that I could have run 25 more miles very easily which was the point of this run, to get confidence on the course. Mohican is definitely going to be a challenging course, as long as I respect the hills and pace correctly I think I can finish. I am reconsidering my 18 min. pace (30 hr. finish.) I think that pace maybe a little too slow and may cause me to run inefficiently which could led to a DNF just as running too fast could. I am beginning to see that there is a very fine line between too fast and too slow, I still have know idea what that line is. There are so many pieces to the 100 mile puzzle; I only hope I can put them together on June 16^th!