Mt. Penn Mudfest & Conestoga Trail with Christopher McDougall & friends

Oh what a day. First of all, I had trouble deciding where I wanted to run on Saturday morning. Ultimately I ended up with the original plan and headed for Reading at 8am to run in the Mt. Penn Mudfest 15k. It was nice that this was a later start race of 10am and I could get a little extra sleep. Still wanted to get there early seeing as there were to be 800 people in this race!

I have never run this race before but have heard what a fun race it was...as are all Pretzel City Races I think. The only problem was that one of the local parks said that they couldnt use their trails for the race this year and therefore the course had to be redone. This cut out 1.5miles of hill and 3water/mud crossings from what I understand. We still had one mud pit to cross and this "man made" one...haha!

And because I am a back of the packer it looked like this until I got to it! The cold water sure did feel good on the feet though!

It really was a fun run. The temps were in the high 40s and sunny. It doesnt get much better then that.
The race starts on a road section to try to spread people out a bit. But there was still alot of congestion for the first 1 1/2miles. After that it was very runnable. PCS is known to have alternative beverage stops at their races and while I know about the beer. I did not realize that they had margaritas! Which I mistook for Gatorade! Oh wow, that will wake you up. I would have preferred to stick with the beer had I known!!

And what trail race wouldnt be complete without falls. I paid my dues today with a good one coming up the steps right before the finish line! Ouchy! But I still finished the race feeling great. Good thing too because we had another run to do in the afternoon.

Fast forward to 4pm. And now we are at Tucquan Glen getting ready to run the Conestoga Trail with a small group including Christopher McDougall, the author of the book Born to Run. He is a neighbor of my good friend Gary and they offered for other people to come along...even slow people ;)

I have never been on the Conestoga Trail before but have heard about it and how hilly it is. It runs along the Susquehanna River and is just beautiful! I loved every minute of this run. Here is a view high above the Susquehanna:

Just follow the orange markers up the rocks...

And then, yep, keep going over these rocks too!

And then you are rewarded with some awesome runnable trails in between!

I ended up running a total of 17miles for the day and with ascent elevation totaling 3250ft. It felt like more and that is a very good day of running for this girl!
Run Free!!