Lake Manchester Trails

I haven’t been blogging much of late, life has been pretty uninteresting. For example, today I tidied up the kidlets’ rooms and also the front study, did the washing up and did some laundry. Now who wants to hear about that? Even better, who wants to help with that?

However, there has been some nice stuff. Last Saturday night the kidlets had a sleepover at Grandmas, and Hubby and I got up really early on Sunday to head over to Lake Manchester for the trail runs. It was a really cold morning at the start, much colder than here closer to the coast. There was a 4k, 8k, 21k and 33.3k option. Given that I was so particular about the 0.3k, guess which one we decided to tackle? Yeah, the long one.

The run had some narrow trials but was mostly along forestry gravel roads, and there were some darned big hills. There were 10 creek crossings along the route, and we managed to cross all but one unscathed. There was just no way to cross that one other than walk through, and the water was icy! It was so pretty!

The view from the top was lovely.

If you can see the left hand

side of Lake Manchester, that’s where we started. It was a long way back to the start!

Checkpoints had drinks, jelly babies, jelly beans, fruit and cake, which were very much appreciated. As were the friendly smiles of the folk manning the checkpoint

Here I am looking like I know what I’m doing!

It took us 5 hours and 15 minutes to do the 33.3km. We walked the uphills, and ran the flats and downhills I actually felt quite cruisy up until the last 2km or so. Then I started to walk some of the flats too . I pulled up really comfortably yesterday, and I was expecting to feel sorer today, but nothing - calves are fine, quads are fine, shins are fine. I think we’ll end up with one more long run before the Kokoda Challenge, and I’m thinking I’ll manage the 94k or 96k in July, can’t remember which. What’s 2k between friends? LOL. What’s really neat is that the Lake Manchester trails appear to be open to dogs on a lead. We’ll check it out and might take the gruesome twosome out there for a run sometime.

We spent the rest of the day walking the dogs, watching Gladiators, having an early dinner and a very early bed. I was planning on taking the Kidlets to the Spectrum Fun Run next weekend while Hubby goes to Mt Mee for the 50k run, but after a run like that one, I just can’t see running for 2k around an industrial estate as being worth the bother. I think I’m spoilt!!

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!