Village Creek State Park's trails

So since my next race is going to be a 50 mile ultra marathon trail race I decided that I should start running on trails more since thats something that I barely ever do. The problem with this is that the city I normally run in has no trails that I know of, so Im stuck with running on roads or a track during the week...

Luckily there is a state park, Village Creek State Park, right by my house. Its literally a 3 mile drive, or I can go the back way and be at the maintenance gate in a little over a mile. Either way its very convonient for me when Im at home. Unfortunatley this means I can only run in them on my weekend long run...

So I hit them for the second time this Sunday (9-18-11) barefoot and managed to get in 11.5 miles, and plan to start running them instead of my long road runs as I can already tell that 50 miles on pavement will not equate to 50 miles on trails.

The trails are prety good quality. The longer trail of the group is big enough to drive a truck down and is an out and back with another loop trail branching off of it at around 3/4ths of the way down it. The rest of the trails are maybe big enough to run a 4 wheeler down and are surrounded by very thick vegatation which provides an excelent canopy of leaves to give shade. The only bad portion is a 1.10 mile loop that I would consider to be somewhat "technical" as it has alot of sharp turns and the path is covered with large exposed roots. But the rest of it is very pleasant with either compacted dirt or sand.

Ok. I cant figure out how to insert pics into the body of a post, or how to add comments to each pic, so heres a description of the pics...

1&2 are examples of the sections covered with roots. If you follow the trail back youll see that the roots continue the whole time. Being BF this makes for very slow going.

3,4&5 are pics of the better portion of the trails. This section runs right along the side of Village Creek and actually ends at the swimming area.

6 is a good example of some of the tougher parts of the good trail. Theres 3 or 4 areas where you drop straight down into a slough, or gully, or washout or whatever you want to call it. Its basically a 6~12 foot drop straight down followed by a 6~12 foot climb straight back up. I only got a pic of the smaller one as it started pouring rain shortly after taking this pic.

7 is just a random shot of the trail that I thought came out pretty cool looking! Makes it look like I was hauling ass!

8 is a pic of Village Creek. Weve been in a historic drought and are several FEET behind in rainfall for the year, along with a few feet behind from last year. So the creek is normally alot higher than this.

9 is a pic of a snake in a hollowed out tree. I saw him slither in there as I was coming up on it so I decided to take a pic. I think it was a Copper head, but Im not too sure...

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