Girls Gone Wildwood

North Country Trail                    Almost every summer I go visit my dad and family for a week in Michigan at their house on Gun Lake . The lake is surrounded by Yankee Springs State Recreation Area , which has enough trails to host a trail marathon . The North Country Trail also runs through the park. I only became familiar with the North Country Trail a few years ago, when dad and I were looking for a new trail to run. It passes through 7 states: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota and is the longest of the 11 National Scenic Trails  at ~2,800 miles. After discovering and running it a few years ago, I have wanted Susan to come visit Michigan and run it with us.  Susan, dad and me trying to do a selfie Susan has become part of our family, so convincing her to come wasn't hard. My step-sister, Gretchen spends the summer at the lake with her 2 sons, Alex (12) and Jake (8). My dad and stepmom being like most grandpar

Susan, Ann, and the Three Sisters-- thank you, fellow runner for taking this! The Peterson Ridge Rumble is an odd race. The two distances-- 20 and 40 miles-- don't follow most race lengths, and it's on a Sunday. It starts and ends in the small, high-desert town of Sisters but is neither at altitude nor has much climbing-- only 3,000 ft compared to Miwok's 11,800 ft. In addition, dogs are welcome on the shorter route. This would be a great race to step between 50k and 50 miles, but that didn't work out for us last year. This year, Peterson took place three weeks before Miwok 100k, so we used it as our last and longest training run. A rainbow leads to Sisters A day or two before Peterson, we got the news that Miwok's cutoff would be 90 minutes shorter than in previous years-- enough so that if I ran the time the registration site (UltraSignup) had predicted for me, I wouldn't make it. This had Ann and I anxious (to put it mildly) so for the first t