the Way of the Turtle

Season of the SnōShū 2010 - Race #4
Mendon Winterfest 10k Snowshoe Race
Sunday, January 17, 2010

Another fun but challenging event put on by Mort & Tim of Goose Racing/RoadsArePoison and their excellent crew of volunteers. Mendon Ponds park is one of the most beautiful parks in the Rochester area (which is saying a lot, given all the fantastic green spaces they have out that way) and one which host many of the trail and snowshoe events in the area. This was my third time running this course, so I knew what to expect - lots of hills! Course conditions were pretty much what I expected, given the warm weather we've had for a couple of days and the fact that those trails are used by a lot of skiers when there's snow - the trails were solidly packed down, some spots were more ice than snow, and in a few places they had to re-route the course to keep us on snow. On the plus side, packed snow usually means fast times and I have no doubt that contributed to my fastest time yet on this course, just under 1 hr 22 min. On the minus side, the pounding means my knees were a bit sore afterwards, but that will pass...

As we were standing around waiting for the race to start (apparently there was a local runner who was on his way) I was surprised to see Bob Dion of Dion Snowshoes come walking up. We chatted a bit about this and that, and he told me about an orienteering race he and Denise did at Mendon last winter, wandering through the full variety of terrain that Mendon has to offer (something about snowshoeing through a swamp...) I guess in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised to see him, since his company is one of the sponsors and Medved Running & Walking is the local distributor for Dion Snowshoes... but having seen him yesterday running at Greylock I wasn't expecting there to be anybody other than me who made the trek west to be at the race today.

A bit of additional uncertainty about today's race was added after I spoke to some of the folks yesterday about how today was a qualifier for Nationals in March and they were very quick to say that my qualifying wasn't nearly the long shot I thought it was. Checking the results from the previous two times I ran this, I discovered that both times I would have qualified had I been a member of the United States Snowshoe Association... by virtue of the fact that the top 5 in each age group qualify and there were fewer than five runners in my age group. So I came to today's race wondering if that trend would hold for a third time. Only an uncertainty, not any additional pressure - this is a fairly fast crowd so I knew the result would only depend on how many USSSA members ran in my age group, not on how quickly (or more appropriately for me, how slowly) I finished. And once the official results are tallied... I'll know whether I'm running the 10k championship or 5k citizens race in Syracuse on March 6...

JMH

2010 Event Totals
Run
Bike
Snowshoe 15.2 mi, 3 hr 53 min

states visited: MA, NY