Sunday’s Bradbury Scuffle at Bradbury Mountain State Park in Pownal was dedicated to the memory of Chris Douglass, a founding member of Trail Monster Running, the group that staged the event.
Douglass, as the race announcer explained before unleashing roughly 175 runners onto the six-mile course, passed away in a car accident a few years back. But he was an avid trail runner, and first met the other founding members of the group on Bradbury Mountain.
“Really our goal is to get people out, seeing the park in a different way than they normally would,” said Ryan Triffitt, race co-director. “We encourage a lot of first timers to come out.”
“That being said, the races aren’t easy,” Triffitt said. “But a lot of people will come, and this will be their first trail race, and they’ll get hooked.”
Triffitt says runners get hooked on trail running for the unique enjoyment it offers, but also because they meet other runners, like-minded, with whom to share the experience.
“Part of it is the fun of trail running, and the other part is the community and the type of people that come out for a race like this. You make some pretty fast friends out here.”
The Scuffle is actually just one of three trail runs that Trail Monster Running has planned for Bradbury Mountain State Park this summer. The Bradbury Mountain Breaker is a nine-miler planned for August 9th, and the Bradbury Bruiser is a 12-miler slated for 12th of September. This is the series’ seventh year.
Trail Monster Running works with Bradbury Mountain State Park, but are a distinct entity, a group dedicated to broadening the appeal of trail running – of winning over new converts – and to deepening the love current devotees to the sport already feel.
“We partner with the Park,” said Triffitt. “The Park is very nice and helps us out, but part of what we do is help the Park get more people out here.”
Trail Monster Running’s efforts are paying off. “Trail running is definitely growing,” Triffitt said. “We’re setting a lot of new faces at all our races, and we’re selling out our races – we have for a couple years now.”
One of the complexities, perhaps, of nurturing the sport’s popularity is the added pressure to not overwhelm the trails themselves, and to ensure that athletes have an enjoyable experience while running in areas that are often confined. The woods loom large around trail runners, and hem them in, and the trails themselves are naturally uneven, strewn with rocks and roots.
“We keep the size small, because we want people to have a good experience,” Triffitt said. “We know we could have more people at these races, because there’s certainly more demand, but – the best trail races are generally the smallest trail races.
“It makes no sense to us to tell people, ‘Come out, come out!’ and then jam them into the trails. They won’t have a good experience. That’s now what we’re about; we’re not doing this to make money.”
Running in general is only growing in popularity, if the profusion of races that athletes can choose from throughout the year is any indication. Websites like runningintheusa.com list several race options for many weekends.
Venerable events like the Beach to Beacon dominate the Maine running landscape, and in so doing, they carve out space for new, smaller events to spring up.
But trail running is obviously a different beast than road-running, and not everyone with a fondness for the one will feel an equal fondness for the other; think mountain biking vs. road biking.
This difference becomes clearer when one reads through Trail Monster Running’s website description of “Who We Are,” which presents a compelling portrait of an athlete dedicated not just to running, but to running in nature – as part of nature.
So it’s interesting to examine the prevalence of trail running by itself. Trail Monster Running and their Bradbury series is certainly a real anchor for the sport in Southern Maine – at present, the group is one of few in the area doing the work they’re doing.
“We don’t work for the Park, and not for the State. [We’re] an independent running club,” said Triffitt. “Technically based in Portland, but we’ve got members all over Southern Maine. We’ve probably got 75 members, who run everything from 5Ks to 100-milers.”
Other trail runs do exist, of course. Pineland Farms, in Gray, for instance, is home to a set of trails and a number of events, including the State’s biggest trail race, the Salomon Trail Running Festival, which happens every Memorial Day weekend. This year, the two-day event welcomed more than 1900 participants.
That’s obviously far, far more than the 175 the Bradbury Scuffle topped out at. But there’s a proviso: the trails at Pineland Farms were designed with cross-country skiers in mind, and so are wide and flat, and thus can readily accommodate a huge number of people, according to Erik Boucher, who owns GiddyUp Productions, which organizes the event, now in its 10th year.
“They’re basically twelve-foot-wide roads through the woods,” Boucher says of the trails at Pineland. “There are ditches on the side for drainage, and it’s very level. It’s not technical at all; there’s no rocks and roots to speak of.
“When we first created [Salomon], one of our goals was to create a bridge between the marathon road-running community and the ultra-trail-running community. So the trails [at Pineland] lent themselves nicely to introducing people.”
Trail Monster Running and GiddyUp aren’t the same entity, and there’s no official connection between the two groups, but there is some overlap – Boucher is a member of Trail Monster, and many of the Trail Monsters volunteer at Salomon. Likewise, Ian Parlin, Triffitt’s cohort at Trail Monster, helped Boucher found Salomon a decade ago.
Boucher describes “I haven’t really checked,” he says, “but I’m pretty sure it’s probably the largest trail-running event on the eastern seacoast, really.”
As such, it attracts runners from all over. “It’s usually 40-plus states or so that are represented,” Boucher says. He adds that one of the draws for runners from far away are “ultra-race” options, such as 50Ks and 50-milers. Pineland Farms hosts such events, as does Bradbury Mountain State Park.
Beyond the Trail Monster series and the annual Salomon Festival, there are a handful of other Trail Runs in Southern Maine, such as the Falmouth Five and Dime five-miler and 10-miler, orchestrated by the Falmouth Land Trust. Those races were held on June 28 this year. There’s also Kelli’s Track and Trail Run, a 5K benefit in Windham for the Kelli Hutchinson Memorial Playground, the St. Ann’s Capital Campaign and the Windham Primary School Playground Fund. According to the event’s website, Kelli Hutchinson was 10 when she succumbed to cancer in 2010. That event is slated for August 15th.
Trail Monster Running is online at www.trailmonsterrunning.com. Bradbury Mountain State Park can be found at www.bradburymountain.com. Pineland Farms is at www.pinelandfarms.org. The Falmouth Land Trust is at http://falmouthlandtrust.org, and Kelli’s 5K is at www.kellis5k.com.
Trail runners receive instructions prior to the start of Sunday’s Bradbury Scuffle.
Racers, some starting their personal stopwatches, take of at the start of Sunday’s Bradbury Scuffle.
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