Lost in the Pines: A North South Trail Tale

Well, maybe that was a misleading title.  There certainly is a tale to tell, but it has already been well-told and well-illustrated by Jon over at his blog.  I encourage you to read his whole report to get a sense of how much more sizeable this endeavor became when we actually got out onto the trail.  Many lessons were learned over the course of our NST thru-run, and cathartic moments shared the stage with dull, grinding ones.  Here is a choppy and informal summary:


February 27th, 2012.  We woke up at 3:45 AM.  Game faces were donned, final gear prep performed, and we drove away from the hotel forty-five minutes later.  Directions to the trailhead were left at the hotel.  We zigged and zagged, eventually finding a place where the North South trail crossed a road.  This turned out to be the wrong trailhead, but we found the actual start of the NST and the Mass border at 6:12 AM.  From there, we ran south relentlessly, working around IT band injuries and hip flexor weakness, dodging rocks that grew to boulders, falling into (un)graceful barrel-rolls over ice and roots, bleeding without noticing, dodging traffic sometimes, gazing around open-mouthed in search of the next turquoise blaze, enjoying amazing crew support at approximately nine road crossings, not speaking when we felt awful, cracking bad jokes when we felt great, losing patience with ourselves, gaining it back, taking wrong turns, backtracking, running through the most technical trail section at night with a single light, shrinking our universe to a five-foot radius, shivering when we stopped, sweating as we cranked up the pace, losing all spatial sense in a vast agricultural field, passing over dozens of bog bridges, consuming large quantities of Ensure, Twix bars and various forms of caffeine, watching a starry night sky be consumed and then regurgitated by drifts of threatening clouds, and finally dipping our feet into the Atlantic Ocean at the NST's southern terminus, 19 hours and 38 minutes later.

We owe an awful lot to our faithful crew, who seemed to have an infinite supply of anything we ever needed!  Also, we would like to thank the National Psoriasis Foundation for collaborating with us on this first run (hopefully on many more!), and for setting up a donation site for the Runs for Relief project.  Speaking of donations, THANK YOU to all those who donated fiscally to our cause of finding a psoriasis cure!  You guys are serious rock stars!  Also, many thanks to the fine folks over at Spira Footwear for hooking us up with the snazzy Stinger XLT for the Rhode Island run.


Both Jon and I have large life changes coming up within the next month, so we're still waiting to see how things settle out and when we'll be able to do another Run for Relief together.  Stay tuned though, and again, thank you all for your support!


-- Robert Rives, 3/7/2012