Courain Brothers compete in NYARA Hike-A-Thon

Rev3\Mountain Khakis Adventurte Racing Courain Borthers compete in the
NYARA Hike-A-Thon

John and I got an early start on saturday morning and headed up to Sterling Forest, NY for a fun trail race. This year at registration we found out that UPS had misplaced a large box of NYARA thongs, so we all got visors instead, which are much more acceptable to wear in public. We registered and got our maps for the course, which turned out to be a 20.07 mile loop through the sterling forest park. The mild winter so far actually threw us for a loop and brought about an inch of snow the previous night, making the course a little more fun in my opinion. Our hopes for this race were to do well, but still treat it as a winter training session. We had a plan to take the hills easy in order to save our legs, but keep a quick pace wherever else was possible. wearing the mandatory backpack with 10% of your body weight was a nice way to add in some resistance for the already challenging terrain. After the 9 am start, we quickly fell into a comfortable pace, while keeping to our plan, trying to not get in a footrace with all of the other runners, but just focus on what we were trying to accomplish with our training, and avoid an overuse injury. About an hour into the run, we were well spaced out, with one person out in front of us, and the rest of the group behind us out of sight and sound. entering into the 2nd hour of the run, we started on the most technical section, a ridgeline, which gave us great views of the lakes and surrounding areas, but the steep ups and downs along with twisty narrow singletrack did slow the pace quite a bit.after the last bit of ridgeline, we took a long descent down some torn up fire road, with lots of loose rocks and mudpits which made for an interesting choice of lines, and further made it difficult to open the pace up. Once we were out of the lowlands, the trail firmed up and we had a solid run back towards the finish line. The last section of trail circumnavigated the lake, where we started, and stayed relatively flat and open, which was a nice way to finish the run. When we got to the finish, John opened up his stride just enough so that he could say he beat me, but we were very happy with our place of 2nd and 3rd, and time of 4:50. my altimeter showed just under 3k feet of total elevation gain for the run, and we stuck to our race plan and finished injury free, which is another success. This was a great way to wake our legs back up for the upcoming season, and get us pumped!