Ron Crozier's Birthday Run

Okay so this isn't exactly a timely post but it is a good one.  This summer I was training for the Vermont 100 miler so I was looking for some company on a long training run.  My good friend Ron had a birthday in a few days so I suggested...let's celebrate your birthday by doing a run...a really long run.

This also happened to be in the middle of the summer in TN so it was oppressively hot most days.  Besides, both Ron and I are married and you can't exactly go do a seven hour run without resulting in a unhappy wife.  So we devised the idea to do the run in the middle of the night.

We pulled up to Cheatham Wildlife Management Area at the very back of the park.  This is what we saw....

The gate to the natural area was on a large gauge gravel road which we departed down after midnight. 

This day was Ron's 35th birthday so our goal was to run 35 miles.  It was still quite hot but not as hot during the day time and sun light.  We took plenty of water and kept up with the nutrition/electrolyte intake...

Photo: Ron is either flashing a gang sign, or saying "I'm this many."

This was a great chance for me to test run my Columbia Mobex pack.  I later used this pack for a double crossing of the Grand Canyon, and some other challenging training runs.

We didn't have any formidable wildlife run ins, and we didn't find any puppies in the woods.  Just this frog.

We were both glad to be back to the car after 7 hours and 35  miles.  This was Ron's most epic run ever.  It is good that Ron got this run in because he has a new project that is taking up most of his time these days.