Off to the Promise Land

The Promise Land 50K++ that is. This is one of my favorite races so I'm really looking forward to going back and racing it while I'm in decent shape. The race is held in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virgina just North of Bedford over a very rugged and scenic course. See pictures here.

 This will be my 6th time racing the course and one year when it didn't fit my racing schedule I swept 25 miles of the course. I ran my best time back in 2007, running 7:11 that year but then I was not able to return until 2011. Of course last year was just 5 days after running in the Boston Marathon so my goal was to just have fun and run as much as possible with my friend Jenn. you can go back to the blog archives from last April and see the videos from that one. To give you a comparison of the difficulty of the course, my 50k pr is 4:44 compared to that 7:11 here

. I've been feeling great and seemed to be recovered from the 100 miler 4 weeks ago so I'm hoping to run well this year. The plan is to get the first big climb done and see how I'm feeling. If all is well then it's game on and I'll shoot for a course pr. I've got my splits from that 2007 race so as long as I'm close I'll keep pushing. But if I'm not feeling that good or way off the pace I can still enjoy the beauty and have some fun.