Join us for a half-day-trip to Wachusett Mountain, a mountain with beautiful panoramic views from the summit, located an hour away from Boston. We'll leave MIT at 9:00am and return in the early afternoon.

We'll be running this route, which has about 1800' of elevation gain over 5.5 miles of running on somewhat technical terrain. We'll be summiting the mountain twice over the course of the run. The elevation profile is quite different from our usual Middlesex Fells runs: instead of rolling hills (and 700' of total gain), we'll have sustained gain for 1000' of elevation at a time, and a total of 1800' of gain. We'll be running slower, especially on the uphill portions, compared to the Fells runs.

This will be a no-drop run. We will run at a pace that's comfortable for everybody on the trip. One goal of this trip is to be an introduction to sustained uphill running for people who haven't had a chance to do it before. We might end up walking some parts of the uphill.

This run is part of an "Introduction to Trail Running" series. We're organizing a number of events over the spring and summer with the goal of introducing (road) runners to trail running, starting with local trail runs and working our way up to mountain runs in New Hampshire.

If you're interested in hearing about future trail runs and workouts that are a part of this Introduction to Trail Running series, please fill out this form. If you're interested in MITOC trail running events in general, join the mitoc-mountainrunning mailing list. If you're on Strava, join the MITOC Trail Runners group!

Prerequisites

In order to make sure everyone on the trip has a good experience, we're trying to be as precise as possible with prereqs. Don't let these prereqs be intimidating: if you satisfy the prereqs, then you're a great fit for this trip.

This is a moderate-to-difficult trail run, which is why we're asking that people have running experience, hiking experience, and some trail running experience. It's fine if you don't have experience running on bigger mountains. As a rough guideline, you should:

• Be comfortable running 8 miles on flat road at a 9:00 min/mi pace, and this pace should feel fairly easy (e.g., you should be able to hold a conversation); you should have done such a run in the past 2 months
• Have done a hike with at least 2,000 ft of elevation gain in the last 6 months
• Have done a 4 mile trail run in the last 6 months (such as this one)

If you don't satisfy the prereqs, you're welcome to sign up anyways, but please email the leaders describing your recent running experience and fitness routine, so we can make sure this is the right trip for you. (Note: we'll be running a variety of trips over the coming months, of varying difficulty.)