Distance Skate 10K Ride

Since I've been concentrating on the dance/freestyle aspects of my skating, I've not been doing much (meaning: any) distance skating. I've been tempted to hit the Razorback Greenway a few times, but the sheer amount of people on the trail lately has kept me away. In fact, I've been completly unable to run my favorite off-road trails since the pandemic closures shut down businesses and people decided to hit the trails for something to do.

So, because I've not been distance skating, I have also quit checking on the Distance skate groups on Facebook. Honestly, I find Facebook to be a necessary evil. I long for the days when forums were active. I see half thought out political posts by people that I tend to respect and it puts me off Facebook more and more. ANYWAY, I found out a day or two late that there was a 10k challenge last month, but after checking out the times this morning, I decided to skate a 10k at my local paved "trail."

I put trail in quotation marks because this trail is just over .25 of a mile. It is almost a track, but it has a couple extra turns and isn't completely flat. In fact, it has one flat section, two slightly uphill sections and one slight downhill with a couple turn in it. Well, I say that but the course would, of course, be just the opposite were I skating clockwise. For some reason I always skate this thing counterclockwise. I have no idea why.

So, I skated just ever so slightly over 10k this morning:

Judging from the times of the racers that actually competed in the challenge, I need to work on my distance skating. In my age group I would have placed 20th out of 30 and overall I would have been 85th out of 138. Not great, but I'm not upset about it. I've not skated distance in a couple months and the courses turns really slow me down. I think I could do a little better on the Memphis Greenline. 

I hope they keep these challenges up. I probably won't enter the actual virtual race, but competing against their times is a fun challenge and a nice change of pace from freestyle/dance skating.