West Virginia Mountain Trail Runners

Nice job, Dan T.  Good pics!  Here are some more pictures from the Trilogy.  Some of you have expressed interest in purchasing a pic or two.  Contact me if you’re interested.

Joel

Over the last 10 months I’ve taken several thousand images of athletes at local races for iplayoutside.com.  Taking photos at events keeps me in contact with the group that I love being around even though I haven’t been running much at all.  Some of my favorites images have come from the ultras hosted by WVMTR.  Hiking in to a good location to shoot allows me to take in some scenery that you can’t see unless to get out there.  I’m not a big fan of the flies that seem to find me after standing still for 30 seconds.  At Highlands Sky and the WV Trilogy I felt like Pigpen from the Peanuts surrounded by a cloud of dirt and the flies.

My favorite image from the Trilogy was this picture of Dan and Kat giving the race briefing prior to the 5K and half marathon.  These guys and Adam had put so much effort into organizing this epic event and they were almost finished.

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While we’re all still giddy about how awesome the Trilogy was, most of us are back to doing what we normally do…trying to file away those precious days at the Mountain Institute like a summer fling with an ol’ sweetheart.  But for some of us, what we “normally do” is pretty fun too.

We’ll file this under the category What Trail Runners Do, When They Aren’t Running Trails.  I’ve been making a trilogy of my own for Running Times about a gait analysis lab in Charlottesville, VA (not far from the abode of WVMTR board member Mr. William Potts).

Here’s the video Fixing Broken Runners: Part I the evaluation

Here’s the second Fixing Broken Runners: Part II the comeback

Look for Part III to come out in two weeks at runningtimes.com

A couple notes from my time there:

Charlottesville is a fun town and there are a lot of runnable mountains between here and there.  There’s even some great trail running within C’ville.  Notably the Ragged Mountain Reservoir loops and the Carter Mountain trails that lead up to Monticello.  A word to the wise, on the Ragged Mountain Preserve trails: running is forbidden.  Yes, you are not allowed to have both feet off the ground at the same time.  Loud talking is verboten, as are dogs, horses, and anything else that you can spell with the letters F-U-N.  Needless to say, rather than tearing it up, shredding the trails there, I enjoyed a quiet, contemplative stroll in hushed tones with my shirt on and not even thinking about dogs or horses or any other domesticated beast.

Later on down the dusty trail,

Joel

Complete Trilogy results are now posted at the link below. It was a memorable three day experience for all of us. Send your race report to irunwv@gmail.com, we would all enjoy hearing your story! 

Results Here

     48 hours before the start

For those of you who weren’t there this weekend and for those of you that were and want to relive the awesome event, here’s an update about the 2010 Trilogy. The weather was spectacular and the recent rains helped the foliage peak out for the 50 Miler on Saturday.

I will be posting a slideshow of Trilogy pictures at Running Times later this week. I will also get a gallery together of the rest of the pictures. Dan Todd’s pictures will be available on iPlay before long. And Dan Lehmann will be posting results tonight, when he gets home.

Though the focus of the event was more on camaraderie than competition here are the winners:

Overall Male Winner: Gancho Slavov of Morgantown (94 miles in 15:39)

Overall Female Winner: Kristen Krempasky of PA (20:55)

Joel