Trail Run - Usery Park Wind Caves

Where: Usery Mountain Regional Park - Mesa AZ
When:  June 1st, 2010 5:00am
Who: Leiftime Fitness group
Description: Tuesdays mornings are now "Wind Cave's" trail run at Leiftime Fitness . 3 miles out and back with 900ft elevation gain.

Haven't done many trail runs since Peralta to First water...when I was invited to hit the trials with some of the trainers from the Crossfit gym I go to I signed up. (Thanks Sarah for getting us out there!!) Usery Mountain Regional Park is about 10-15 minutes from my house and Loree and I road bike past it all the time. I have run several trails  there including "pass mountain" but it never really occured to me to run/hike/stumble up the wind cave trail.

Garmin 305 route tracking for the Wind Caves Trail run....stats listed below.

I missed the group of 3 by about 5 minutes so started the run on my own from the trail head. In the first minute or 2 my heart rate hit about 180bps...so I had to slow down and more of fast hike/jog up. The trail is pretty rough in spots requiring some hands and scrambling but just steep enough in many spots to prevent me from being able to run...

 Looking back down the trail from the top. (25 minutes to the top...1.5 miles)

 View from the top...overlooking beautiful Apache Junction :)

Looking out from the Wind Caves towards Rio Salado Sportsmans Club...good place to shoot.

I took about a minute break at the top and headed back down. I can get all 200+ lbs of me moving pretty fast down hill...took about 17 minutes to get back down to the truck. Overall, definitely a great morning workout...feels more like fun than exercise...trail running is great.

Signed up for an account on Garmin Connect...you can upload/store all of your garmin data from workouts and gives some great graphs and details...

These are from Garmin Connect...heart rate average 140bps, good climb up and down...and yes, pretty slow "minutes/mile." Definitely room for improvement.

Doing this again tomorrow morning...June 8...anyone up for it?