I will not be afraid of the chupa...I will not be afraid of the chupa...

Well this week was another one that ended in a race.  I am kind of getting used to this and liking it too!  This weekend my friends, Libby, Catherine, Shannon, and I braved the chupacabra and ran the Los Chupacabras de DFW 10K trail race at Lake Grapevine's Rockledge Park.  I will just go on record as saying that there is a reason it is called ROCKledge park.  I have never seen so many huge rocks to run over, across, around....you name it!  I didn't really have time to be worried about animals eating me because I was so worried about falling on a rock.  That has to be the most technical course that I think I have ever run and we did it in the dark.  The four of us held back at the beginning and let all the speedy people go out and then we got in our own groove and ran the whole thing except for a few places where it was way too dangerous.  At the beginning and the end the trail was on the side of the of the lake.  So if you fell, not only were you on just huge rocks, you would fall off and roll down to the lake.  As we were giggling about this on the last mile in,  my friends informed me not to trip as they wouldn't come save me from the lake and all fun things that reside in it.  Those rascals...We were doing really good...holding a nice steady pace with Libby up front with her new super, duper high beam headlamp.  I was second followed by Catherine and Shannon.  We got to about mile 3 and some lady was yelling something that sounded like "Chupa, Chupa!!!"  So Catherine started yelling it back because we thought the lady was trying to scare us or just be funny, because seriously, it was after 9:00 in the middle of the woods, why would anyone be out there if they weren't some kind of nut doing a 10K in the dark, right?  Well, turns out the lady had lost her dog and it happened to be named Cooper and she was calling him!  We felt kind of bad then...but I still think it was kind of funny...So on we go, mile 1, 2, and 3 were pretty uneventful except for the lost dog and a bunch of giggling and hurdling chupa poop (ie. glow sticks that mark the trail)...So we finally hit the last aid station at about mile 4 and the guy asked us if we were the last ones...I'm secretly hoping we aren't and Catherine told him actually we were at the front of the race, not the end just to give him a hard time. :-)  We knew we weren't dead last though, probably pretty close to it, but I didn't care too much.  So off we go and we get about a tenth of a mile from the aid station and all of a sudden Shannon, who was running about a foot in front of me, went flying and screaming and landed smack dab in the middle of the trail.  We all stopped and she was saying she couldn't get up and she wouldn't roll over either.  The rest of us thought she had broken her arm because of the way it was all underneath her.  She eventually rolled over and her arm was fine, but as she rolled over I noticed where her knee had been was a HUGE rock!  So her palms were all scraped up, really bad, but her knee was cut and I was worried more that it would do something internal to her knee because she landed right with that rock in her knee.  Luckily, the guys that were working the aid station that we had just passed heard the commotion and came out to us.  One of them was a paramedic (they were also marines) and they got her cleaned up and drove her back to the starting line where they got her ice, band aids, and some beer. Apparently they offered her water, and she told them no...she would take a beer...I love it!  Meanwhile, the rest of us went on our merry way.  A little more cautious at this point because all of us have races coming up, including Shannon who has a marathon in 2 weeks and was now sitting at the finish line waiting on us all banged up with a beer.  So we went on and it seemed the longer we ran, the more technical the trail got and at one point we were literally climbing up this rock wall.  Good times!  We finished up running along that crazy rock ledge that led down to the lake and then were done!  We headed back to the starting line and had a great BBQ dinner that was catered in and also some ice cold beer.  It was a great race and we had LOTS of fun!  I will totally do it next year.  I kind of like the night running.  It adds a whole new challenge to trail running. I don't know why that matters, trail running is a challenge for me in the day light and I have no idea how I didn't fall last night.  I think maybe I pay more attention to stuff in the dark because I have to.
I'll definitely do this race again next year and hopefully we can get more people to go because it was a good time!
So all in all, the chupa only got Shannon...but she gave him a good fight!

Catherine, Libby, Shannon, and Me
Before the Chupa 10K