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Labor Day weekend held glorious weather, which allowed us to *finally* get in our first hike of the season.  We originally planned to leave at the crack of dawn on Saturday, but later decided that nothing beats a good sleep to start the long weekend, and traffic cooperated so we didn’t kick ourselves for making the choice to sleep a couple more hours.  We headed up to the Tripyramids for an 11 mile loop that bagged two more 4000 footers.  The hike included plenty of warm-up on the logging road, as well as plenty of typical New England hiking – straight up a rock slide (and also down a rock slide, which might be just as bad)!  Just as we’ve learned that running any road with “Hill” in its name means you’ll get just what is advertised [Old Town Hill, Cherry Hill, and most notably Meeting House Hill], when the trail has “Slide” in its name you’ll similarly are signing up for a challenge!  We were rewarded with great views from the rock slides.

On Labor Day I ran the “Around Cape Ann” road race.  This is round 2 of my 2000 season repeat, and I was a bit nervous before the race given my struggles at the Yankee Homecoming race.  I fared better this round with a time of 2:15:52, beating my 2000 time by almost 10 minutes.  I was especially pleased with running strong through the “16 crazy hills” – the slogan of the race.  Here’s the terrain map with approximate splits.  (Note that some of the markers were probably off, because I don’t think I ran a 7:55 nor do I think I ran a 9:55.  I’m pretty sure my pace was between 8:15 and 9:10 for the most part.)

We hope to get in some more beautiful fall hikes between our major races over the next month.  Up next – Brian races his International length triathlon in Freeport next weekend!