Half Voyageur Trail Marathon

We went to Colorado for a few days and got in some good running. I was expecting the altitude to have an adverse effect but ran just fine - didn't feel especially winded at any point - and even took down a huge hill during a 10 miler. Maybe the view of the mountains has healing properties or something.

Checking the trail races coming up, I noticed that this coming weekend is the Half Voyageur in Duluth which is actually a full 26.2M marathon - the "half" in the name coming from the fact that the regular Voyageur is a 50 miler. I'm not quite ready for that distance, but the challenge of a trail marathon sounds pretty swell, and, besides, what better way to scream through the marathon distance than by upping the difficulty to a trail run?

(Note that in the past 8 weeks I've done 2 half marathons, a 15 miler and a 16 miler on top of many runs/races varying from 3-10 miles as well as cross-training, so I'm not walking into this untrained...I hope.)

This of course brings down the, ahem, "excitement" of the upcoming Twin Cities Marathon which originally was going to be my entry into that distance. To be honest I'm only doing the TCM to knock a road marathon off my list and I feel I need to "earn" my way into Ultras. I'm losing love for road races, trails are where I want to be but as the immortal Gregory Peck once said in To Kill a Mockingbird: "fuck it".

Ohh pretty. 

Don't think the thought of moving didn't come up...