LOCAL FKT'S

My boyfriend and partner in crime, Peter, has been working his ass off the last couple of months getting our local running shop, North Shore Athletics, back up and running.  It went into receivership a few months ago and to make a long story short, he worked there for 10 years, there was a hiccup with the owner, Peter left, just shy of a year later the store went bankrupt, and eventually was bought by new owners (Kintec) who hired Peter back as the manager (smart owners!) and kept the NSA name.

I think he and his co-workers have done an amazing job thus far and it is so great to get back in the place where my running career began. Peter has thought up a few neat ideas and one of them has been the local FKT's.

What is an FKT you say? Well, FKT stands for 'fastest known time' and essentially it's a speed record. There is an official website where people can post their FKT's for well known routes such as the West Coast  and Juan de Fuca Trails. Together, we have decided on a few local routes that we love and have posted them on a white board in the store. We have 5 routes right now but we do foresee this list growing in the future. This is totally done on the honor system and meant to be something fun for the running community to take part in and perhaps mix up their speed training routines. I should also mention that there are spots for both Female/Male and Masters Female/Male FKT times. There are also descriptions of the routes in the store where you can get exact start and finish locations for each route.

Peter and I have always run together but in the last couple of years that has fallen off as he took an extended break from running after completing the Western States 100 in 2010. We used to do the majority of our speed work together an often got into a cat and mouse kind of game together out on the trail. Since his leave of absence from our training partnership I have done little to no speed training and it's so nice to be doing this again. However, I am not very motivated by intervals at the track so these FKT's are a pretty fun way to get in some speed/tempo work. We threw down the first Short Lynn Loop one's today but both of us are recovering from being sick so I think these times might be a bit soft....good starting point for some challengers!!!!!

I look forward to seeing these times fall and to see who comes out to challenge them!

See you in the trails...