Last year, I spotted a fantastic looking event, the Bonkhard Berryman Duathlon. It had mountain biking, it had trail running, it should be great! Unfortunately I think it fell the week before my trail half-marathon (which didn’t actual happen thanks to a hurricane!). This year I had another reason to miss it: I hadn’t run more than 5 miles since January.

But I wanted to make the event, regardless. So I took off before sunset for the fabled Berryman Trail. The Berryman is an IMBA epic rated trail that winds about 24 miles around the rolling hills in the Ozarks. I had never set tread or shoe to the trail, but I was excited to see what it held.

I started on the bike and I was glad for it. I was about third into the singletrack, but this allowed me to get “used” to the trail. When you have rolling hills like this, your trail is mostly bench cut onto steep slopes, which means you’re keeping an eye on your line — too far to the right and you’re suddenly on an ad hoc downhill course! I picked up some steam, moved into second for a while, but yielded that at the bottom of the hill. Some of the descents were pretty technical and ascending you had to fight your way up roots and rocks. Basically you were fighting to keep rolling (which left me longing for 29er).

One nice thing about riding the Berryman during a race: you have signage to point you in the correct direction. The Berryman is in the center of a large national forest and has many mapped fire roads, many unmapped fire roads, and many places that look like fire roads. Luckily the race team posted a volunteer at the fire road we were supposed to turn at to get us back to the main road. Once on the road, I was able to keep the pace above 20 mph and topping out over 30 mph (nothing like tucking down on a gravel descent).

Knowing that I was in for 6 hours of racing, I didn’t try to get the fastest transition into the run, but was able to get running soon after arriving. The running leg was a blast: I love trail running, but just haven’t been able to do much of it this year. The beginning of the run was perfect mix of uphill and downhill, roots and rocks to keep things interesting. Knowing I wasn’t in running form, I fast walked many of the steep uphills. The later part of the run though was a massive climb up a fire.

All in all, I finished two laps (one lap is equivalent to one bike leg and one run leg) in a little less than 5 hours. That’s about 24 miles of biking and about 9 miles of running! The second lap on the mountain bike leg I found my knee was still not happy from the previous weekend’s race and so handling the rollers and all of the roots was getting painful. After running (and mostly walking) the run leg, I just called it a day.

Looking forward to next year if I can get some better running in my legs by August!