Race Season - Done!

I spent the weekend in Oil Creek State Park with M at the Oil Creek 100 Trail Runs, wrapping up the race season, and enjoying the fall colors. My parents took the kids for the weekend, and I brought my bike with us up to the park so I had a great time biking between aid stations and around town. Oil Creek has a 9.7 mile bike trail that is paved and pretty flat and winds alongside the creek. I didn't take a single picture, but imagine the paved path edged with bright green moss, trees towering overhead with yellow and red leaves and the gentle sound of a wide shallow creek. Saturday morning started out foggy and dreary, but the skies cleared around noon and it got quite hot. M ran the 100 mile event for the third year and had a good race, finishing third and in just over 20 hours. His friend Jeff came up to pace him for the last 25 miles. I spent a good part of the day (and night) hanging out around the aid stations and meeting the families and friends of other runners. There are a huge number of volunteers who come out to mark the course, keep track of the runners, cook food for them, provide first aid when needed and cheer them on. This is pretty common in trail ultras, which is why I never feel too bad when I send M off to a do a race on his own. But it was fun to be there.

One of the interesting things about these trail races is the impact they have on the public parks and lands where they take place. The volunteers at these races are also the people who clear blow downs and repair fallen side hill trail and perform incredible feats of engineering by moving heavy boulders into place to create a natural stairway and keep the rain running off in a certain direction. They pick up trash from lands that have long been used as dumping grounds and turn them into pristine pockets of nature.

Oil City and Titusville were literally the center of the world's oil boom and all of that land the Oil Creek State Park currently sits was pretty trashed by that boom. So it's cool to see that a group of locals have managed to rehabilitate it into a really nice recreational space, and the trail race helps to highlight that and also keep some interest and money flowing towards supporting the ongoing efforts to keep it nice.