Just a week after the challenge and excitement of Montana’s Bridger Ridge Run, I find myself in Roanoke, Virginia for a niece’s wedding, and scout out a place to squeeze in a run.  Bonus!  I should have remembered this from my college days in central Virginia, but the Appalachian Trail, or AT, runs along the northwest edge of Roanoke. The 80 year old AT runs from northeast Georgia to Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine, roughly 2200 miles of trail bisecting fourteen states.

I picked out a portion of the trail that worked out to about a five mile round trip, up to a jagged rock formation aptly named Dragon’s Tooth.  I was surprised by the trail;  parts of it were runnable, but other stretches were rocky, slippery and steep, and more technical than I expected, given the rolling nature of the Appalachian Mountains.   One section was straight up a rock face and required navigating a series of four inch ledges.  Tricky though doable, but I could imagine that it could be quite difficult for someone with a heavy backpack who is “through hiking” the entire length of the AT.  Based on what I’ve read, much of the AT is rocky.  Indeed the section that runs through Pennsylvania is so rocky that they refer to it as “Rocksylvania”.

In case you’re wondering, the record for completing the AT from Georgia to Maine is 46 days, and is held by Scott Jurek, an ultra marathoner who also won the Western States seven times in a row.  After setting the AT record, he caused quite a kerfuffle when he and his support team broke a bunch of rules by their champagne celebration on Sugarloaf Mountain.  Doing the math, it looks like he averaged just under 50 miles a day, pretty impressive!