Trail Running Summary for 2022

I've been trying to find places to run for ~3 weeks now and it looks like this year may be finished in terms of trail running. The usual haunts (exits 34, 45, and 47 off of I-90) are buried under an avalanche of snow, and the Mountain Loop Highway is closed.

I tried to run Rainy Lake on 11/04 and it was a nightmare... arguably the worst rainy conditions I've ever run in. And since then, I've been out to try to run Mason Lake, and/or Olallie Lake, and/or anywhere in North Bend and I can't due to my profound inability to get to a trailhead.

So with that said, perhaps it's okay to do a year-end summary.

Here's a table of trail run data from runs in 2022 that I classified as "Training[1]":

Here are some stats on those numbers:

Note that if you take out the data where trail conditions were Poor, and remove Rainy Lake (as it's a total outlier in terms of pace), my Average Pace Out becomes 14:10 (minutes/mile), which I think is a little more representative of my actual pace.

Some things of note, in no particular order:

• The biggest year over year change is in elevation gain per run.
    — In 2020, it was 1,334'.
    — In 2021, it was 1,558'
    — In 2022, it was 1,946'
• My average distance seems to be leveling out at approximately 8 miles:
    — In 2020, it was 6.4 miles.
    — In 2021, it was 7.9 miles.
    — In 2022, it was 8.1 miles.
• The absolutely brutal pace of Rainy Lake is unavoidable. It's just a wicked difficult trail upon which to run. That said: the 2nd time I ran it was at a pace of 21:23 (vs the 1st attempt which was at 24:09)... that's a big difference.
• Elevation Gain matters. It has a huge effect on pace.
• So does snow. "Conditions = Poor" usually means snow, and it's very difficult to run in snow. Note the two Thompson Lake paces. The 1st involved snow after mile ~2... the 2nd didn't involve snow at all. There's a 2 minutes per mile difference.
• I'd argue Mt Defiance was my favorite run this year. I never thought I'd even be able to complete a run like that, but here we are.
• The big gap in July (and the 1st half of September) was due to my hiking up a storm.
• Nearly every "Partial" is due to my inability to route-follow in snow. Keep in mind that I don't have a whole lot of gear when I run, so I'm a bit limited by how much risk I can incur trying to route-find over snow[3].

Note that I did do some runs I classified as "Maintaining", meaning: they were decent, but not what I'd consider to be "Training" per se[2].

These were generally "I have no other option"-type runs... e.g.: running on the Dingford Creek Access Road was among the least enjoyable of any run I've done (but at least I could find a place to run).

These runs are intended to try to maintain some kind of reasonable level of cardiovascular condition for when the "real trail runs" resume.