Goggins has nothing on me

Two left gloves

Between the sun and moon

Slow in the snow

Mod Long

Unsupported (and overall) FKT. Old FKT was 8:14:44.

https://fastestknowntime.com/route/wild-river-loop-nh

This was burly. I forgot how tough these trails are, and how hard it is to move quickly on infrequently-maintained, and infrequently-used trails in the Wilderness.

For about 80% of my time out there, I didn't think there was any way I could get the FKT. That's because of two things: 1. The Highwater trail was taken over by... well, high water. Much or most of it is washed out. So I spent lots of my first 2-3 miles bushwhacking, kinda lost in pre-dawn not-quite-light-enough-to-see-very-well conditions. 2. In part because I wanted to run under 8 hours, and in part because I was going by the mileage posted by the first guy to run it (an over-estimate), I kept looking at my splits as they ticked over, and ALMOST ALL OF THEM were over the AVERAGE pace I needed to keep. That's bad. I thought for a while that maybe I could run some 10-min miles on the second half of the loop, but the reality of the wilderness trails and White Mountain trails in general didn't really fit with that. You'll see that I ran pretty hard and came out with something like 12:45 miles in the Wilderness...

Tough day out, but I got it done! I think in better conditions and spending less time schwacking, I could probably do this in 7:30? It'd be hard. Someone faster than me could probably do it in 6:30 in ideal conditions, but I'd be shocked to see faster. The trails are just too gnarly!

In all, I love the Wild River Wilderness, and I'm glad this loop was doable for me - before carefully looking over the route description and mapping it out, I thought the loop would be at least 40 miles with over 10k ft of vert, and I didn't really think I had such a feat in me. Glad it was ONLY at my limit, haha.

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Joffrey Peters

Wild River Loop FKT

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Goggins has nothing on me

Two left gloves

Between the sun and moon

Slow in the snow

Mod Long

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