Tiger Mountain @ Night

Tiger awaits in the distance as darkness comes.

We are hoping to make these a regular occurrence this winter. BS and I ran somewhere around 13 miles with about 3950 of gain. His phone app GPS  thingie said only  11.9, but my Garmin said 13 so of course we go with what mine says. It was really hard to see (duh! It’s nighttime) and on most every part of trail the pace was severely limited by poor visibility more than anything else. Even running up the mountain I couldn’t run as fast as I wanted to just because of it being so difficult to see the hazards.  We did a couple summits,  ran around some  other parts of TMT trail, got semi confused because of the darkness making it a lot more difficult to tell where we were on the trail, but otherwise had a pretty fun time and with that much gain in such a short time that’s a decent run. I also think that by running more technical single track in the pitch black it should also increase our technical running and line choice through the more difficult parts of single track, if not it’s still fun. Or we’ll trip, roll an ankle or have other semi stupid thing happen, but I could just as easily trip on a sidewalk crack in the darkness, I’d much rather run in a mountainous setting.  It is also helpful just becoming more comfortable running in the mountains in the middle of the night solo. Because that always freaks me out. I’m just a kid from upstate NY’s suburbia.

Great visibility. My light is a little better than this, but 140 lumens ain't as great as it sounds on tech trail.