McNaughton?

I went for a run with Wayne today and I think he may have set me up. You see we run together on Thursdays usually with Karen. Today she wasn't able to make it and as Wayne and I exchanged emails as where to run we agreed to run in the River Bottoms from 35W towards the old Bloomington Ferry Bridge.

As I think about it though, he agreed to it rather quickly and I think I know why. You see last week we ran from 35W to the Cedar bridge. Wayne and Karen had not run this section before and it is a favorite of mine except it's too short of a section (~4 miles). Anyway running the opposite way seemed to make sense. If you aren't familiar with this section or even the countless miles of trails along the river bottoms, give it a try some time, anyway here is the map of the run as saved from SportTracks based off of my Garmin data.

If you look at the picture you see how the trail follows the rive and how nice and green everything is. Today everything was white.

Yes we knew it would be snow packed but last week when we ran the opposite way it was fairly runnable. Today it was not, we slipped and slid and got our legs torqued the entire way. We made it out 4 miles and we both agreed that it was time to turn around. As we went along we got to talking about Chippewa. I said I didn't want to ever run in snow again, well at least I don't want to do a 50k or longer in it. Wayne agreed and reminded me again that I could join them at McNaughton. You don't think he could have intentionally brought me to this trail do you? Well, today he made some good points, so I was thinking I would hold off on sending in that entry to Chippewa. As I thought more about it, I was starting to think maybe I should join them at McNaughton then it hit me it does snow in Illinois too. So I think I will wait a few more weeks and see.