Stugart Adventures

Violet and Chippers ready to go!

We spent our Thanksgiving holiday hiking the North South Trail at Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area in Kentucky/Tennessee. This is a 60 mile trail that goes from the North Welcome Station to the South Welcome station in the recreation area.

This is one of the many bridges that we had the opportunity to cross, this is one of the very stable ones. They varied greatly in construction strength, like this one that was rated to five tons to others that bounced up and down as we walked across.

We started on Wednesday with the intention of hiking about 15 miles. We were having a lovely day of walking and we took a lunch break at the Moss Creek Day Use Area.

We had a meal of open face bagel sammiches with cheese and bologna.

We had a very nice view of the Kentucky Lake.

We had the intention of spending our first night at the Sugar Jack Spring shelter, but as we walked until after it was dark, we somehow missed the side trail to the spring and shelter. We continued on until we found a suitable campsite that was near water and flat. It turned out to be a very nice campsite and we managed to hike over 18 miles our first day out.

The next day we continued our hike and to keep us fueled up, we must take several breaks. This is one where the dogs were tell us, ya know, I could do this all the time.

We ended up hiking about 18 miles the second day as well. We were feeling pretty sore and tired and were thinking about home so the 3rd day we decided we would try to do the remaining 25 so we could go home. Well, it worked out that our feet weren’t feeling that and we decided to stick with the original plan of 15 on day three. We camped near an old fire tower that was quite high. The dogs only made it part of the way up before they decided that was enough.

We went on to finish the remaining 11 miles or so on Saturday and were extremely grateful to be able to sit down for a while. All in all it was a good time had by all including Chippers who got to experience his first long distance trekking.

So the training continues.  Yesterday we had a five mile run which we did at Shelby Bottom Park in East Nashville.  The park was a very nice place to run as it was pretty flat.  The Shelby Greenway is part of the Nashville plan to have greenways running throughout the city.
View  Map

Well, it has taken me a while to write but we’ve been busy getting back to work and working on renovations in the house.

We ran the Resolution Run 5K on New Year’s Day in downtown Nashville this year. It was very fun and we did well, especially Reuben, considering it was his first race. He came in 22nd for his age bracket (30-34 year old males).

We ran with Marjorie, a woman I play tennis week a couple of times a week, and one of my mother’s friends. We had a great time but were sad to leave Violet at home, especially when we figured out that she was allowed to be at the race. It was an “anything goes” kind of race….so people had their dogs, baby joggers, mp3 players, etc. We’ll know better next year! (sorry Violet…).

We’re still getting ready for our big run in April and getting faster and in better shape with every run.

Today Missie and I continued our training for the half marathon by running slightly over  two miles.  We usually track our distance with our GPS, but we have run low on batteries so had to go by time today.  Anyway, we also decided to register for a New Years Day 5K called the Resolution Run in Nashville.

Today we continued our training for the half-marathon by running 2 miles at Crockett Park in Brentwood. We are going to try to keep the blog updated with our training workouts and up to date as we prepare for the Country Music Half marathon.

Our route today was on the red portion of the trail leaving Crockett Park running for a mile and returning.  Our dog Violet really enjoys that we are training for a marathon even though she doesn’t really know .  She just likes to get out and run.

I feel obligated to put in a cute photo of Violet here.:

So we decided to run the Country Music Half Marathon. We will begin our training next week and the race will be in March. Missie has run long distances before, but this will be a new challenge for Reuben.