Run to Win

The Bradbury Scuffle is now in it’s third year, and is probably my favorite trail race. No, let me rephrase that…it is definitely my favorite trail race.

We were running a wee bit late out of the house on the way there, and it took a while to find someplace to stow the car at the race, so my warmup was a little lacking at just under 9 minutes.

That’s all right, though, since the humidity meant that it didn’t take much to warm up my muscles anyway and it did it’s most important job: it cleared my head.

I still felt tired and woozy on the drive over to the race despite resting my eyes most of the way (obviously, Erin was behind the wheel.)

While warming up and standing at the stating line, I saw a few people that are normally much faster than I am on the roads, and one person that I thought looked familiar and who warmed up in a BAA singlet but whom I hadn’t met…maybe I had seen him in New England Runner at one point? Turns out that he was Mike Dowling, a 2:34 marathoner. (That’s another way of saying that he’s a lot faster than I am.)
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This past weekend was the second annual Bradbury Scuffle. It was an absolutely beautiful day, and by beautiful I mean in the traditional sunny sense and not in the rainy way that it was beautiful last year. We still had plenty of mud, though, because before the race there had been maybe 4 days of sun in the past 40.

In fact, the trails were much more difficult to run this year because of all the rain that we have been getting. Parts of the snowmobile trail were especially washed out, making footing treacherous. We also had no fears about the knee deep puddles drying up.

The race was almost twice as large this year as last year, with 112 finishers. Almost everybody seemed to enjoy themselves, and nobody got too lost on the course. The one person I’m aware of that went off course was called back by the runners behind him after he ran right by not 1 but 2 large white signs with red arrows telling him to turn.

I ran almost a minute slower this year, finishing in 41:41.41. I attribute the slower time to not only the tougher conditions, but that I had nobody to push me. Eric Mauricette, who finished in 2^nd place, was over a minute behind me in 42:47.

In fact, other than about a mile during my warmup jog and about a 1/3 mile walk while cleaning up the course, I ran the rest of my 15 miles on the day by myself.

I turned back to look at the field when I was less than half a mile in, and I already had a 100 meter lead.

Nobody else was willing to take the pace out as aggressively as I did, and I had no interest in letting somebody cut off my view of the trail in front of me so I ran harder for the first mile than I did at any other point in the race. I wanted to be the first to the single track. So far, that strategy has worked out for me 2 years in a row.

This year, I should be running all 3 races in the Bradbury series, so if you get the chance I’d recommend coming out to the Breaker (9 miles) or the Bruiser (12 miles) later this Summer.

Other Race Reports:

• Photos by Don Penta
• Kevin Robinson
• (more to come as I find them…)

(More Info: Race Website – Full Results – Course Map [PDF])

It has been an interesting week since winning the Cox Sports Marathon this past Sunday. Thanks for all of the comments and congratulations over the past week. It has meant a lot to me, whether it has been in person or on the phone, through email, comments on this site or on others. It’s been a pretty good week that way, and I appreciate it a lot.

Now that my goal marathon for the Spring is out of the way, my next goal is to finally run a sub-16 5k this Summer or Autumn. I have 3 races targeted starting in late August, so my priority for the rest of this month is to recover from a relatively tough training schedule over the past 6 months. It has been one of the most strenuous winters in terms of how much work I managed to get in since I graduated from college, and was well worth it. Now, my body needs a little break.
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