Time of day 12:00 PM
Distance 13.00 mi
Shoe Adrenaline Gts 11 (19)
Comments The end of a journey, five years later. Very glad to have finished this with the same guys we started with, no matter the amount of pain that had to be endured to finish.
As for the run, I can't say it any better than Joe, so here's his log:
This was the main point of the trip, to complete the 93mi greenway run that we started in the spring of 2008. I recall that we stopped on Hughes St in Belfast many years ago. Today we picked up from that location to complete the journey.
I still don't know how my Achilles went from feeling terrible on Thursday to awesome yesterday. My only guess is that Mueller drugged me that night and they popped a cortisone injection into it Thursday night.
Papa Mueller (Rudy) came down from Jamestown with the family motorhome. This made logistics easier and we all piled in. 45min drive to Belfast. I dropped a duce and we prepared to head into the bush. The trail in this area still looked like a well kept lawn, but I wore my running backpack anyway so I could tuck in the machetes. Given the issues with my Achilles, gents rode along on the bike, doing 1mi each, since no one was fond of it.
The trail was in such great condition that I feared this "epic 12mi run" would wind up a 80min easy run. These fears were soon assuaged when there was a barrier indicating the trail was closed ahead. We diverted right into the remains of the canal prism and clawed along, using the machete to cut back up to the grade 50m later. We continued but within 200m we found the reason for the closure; the creek next to the path had eroded out completely a 30m section.
Out again with the machete and I took point. We descended a steep bramble covered slope 10m to the creek, leaped across, and then headed up stream 50m and crossed back. Now it was chest high switchgrass and mud. I chopped what I could, but out legs were still quite lacerated. There should have been plenty of snakes, but we saw none. Luckily Mueller was not stung by the myriad swarming bees. Now we clawed back up the very steep, near vertical dirt bank. I got to the top first, using the machete as a piton, and then a human chain, like a barrel of monkeys got everyone to the top. Rusty barbwire greeted anyone at the top that was not careful.
At this point the bike was not such fun any more. Much effort had been extent getting it up and down the banks and we were only 2K into this 20K run.
We headed onward on the good footing and made good time to 4mi. Here we lost the path again and had to bushwhack a little bit, but nothing was much trouble. Some of us, like myself that had not run much in 3 weeks, started to feel a tad tired, but we kept the dialogue within our own heads. Patrick was trailing badly, but we swore that neither he nor I nor Mueller would touch the bike, since we were the three man to have completed all sections to date.
Around 5.5mi we found Rudy with the motorhome. We dumped the bike on him, got some water and blocked up. Out we went. Here the path took on an unpleasant feature of 2" hunks of gravel as the footing. Clearly this was the historic rail bed ballast. It was very uncomfortable to run on, but we pushed on and after 2K of it, we were back to solid footing.
From this point forward, the was the end of the nice grass trail. It was overgrown more by the mile. Tim and I had pressed on and were leading the expedition. The undergrowth projected into the trali from the left and right such that we soon seemed like football players at practice juking to and fro. Perhaps a mile from Rudy we hit our first solid wall of overgrowth. I hacked at it with the machete and pulled back other areas and we continued.
There were many pointy and sharp examples of vegetation on the trail now. Some would wrap around your leg and has you continued your stride cut into you like a chainsaw chain pulling free. Ouch. Others were fun, like the green pinecones covered with sharp spurs. Of course you dare not touch your aching legs however as we were knee high in poison ivy at many points.
The apex of the run now arrived where we found ourselves on an old causeway of sorts where the rail bed had 50m wide open bodies of water on both sides, only divided by the 5m wide gravel ribbon the separated the water for a mile. Clearly we could not go left or right, and certainly not backward.
The vegetation was literally a hedgerow of very thick brambles fed by the great ample water source. You could not see more than two feet into it, the stems were so thick. I hacked away and made little progress. Tyle came up and helped, using the saw side of the machete to cut the bushes at the base. We were making about 8" a minute progress and still had miles to go. From our perspective, this thicket continued perhaps 800m. We started taking turns, men coming to the front to hack away, then getting bloodies and cut and trading to the next man.
This was the best part of the run. You're tired, having been out for 90min already and it is high noon. Though a cool day, you're sweating and it's running into the dozens of cuts on your legs and burning terribly. You clearly have an interminable amount of shit left to go through, but you continue on because you must, because it is what you came here to do and you must not be defeated. The only way is forward. The ode of the distance runner.
We shortly discovered that with enough force, we could carefully bend back the bushes as a whole. After about five minutes of this effort, we progressed the 30m past this section and were to open trail again. By open trail, I mean chest high sharp weeds that we plowed through. Two more we were stopped by similar thickets, but again we chopped and plowed our way through.
About 10mi, we came upon Rudy and the motorhome again. We implored why he was cutting the route short and he said it was "pretty bad" and "impassible" ahead. We told him to meet us at the end and headed back into the brush. The next mile was similar high overgrowth, but we were able to make good time through it.
We finally popped out into a field where the path was no longer evident at all as a highway berm cut across it. We headed left (south) and were not literally in brush and sharpies at head height. After struggling through 200m of this, we clawed the 15m up to the road and along the edge of it 800m to the motorhome and victory
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