Pocantico Hills Marathon

The Pocantico Hills Marathon is a trail marathon held in the very scenic Rockefeller State Park Preserve and it just celebrated it’s 5^th year. This is my second time running this marathon and one I see myself repeating again in the future.  It’s a marathon that has a very generous cutoff that makes it feasible to hike the course if desired and is thus a great event for a first time attempt at a trail marathon.  The trails are gravel carriage roads with ~2500 feet of elevation gain over the course of the race. It’s a very runnable course. It’s a course I like so much that I took the gpx file from my Coros watch’s recording of the run and created a route in Komoot so I can run the course again in the future (https://www.komoot.com/tour/2678030551). It’s also the type of course I need to focus on more of as I tend to be more of mountain goat than a race horse.  I do really well in ultra’s that are very steep and technical (https://survivingultra.com/2025/04/28/nj-spartan-ultra/), but tend to be very slow at the flatter more runnable courses.

While I was still towards the back of the pack in this event, I’m happy with my performance in the race as my training had been focused more on leaning out than running over the past few months and I had been in a caloric deficit up until a couple of days before the race.  My performance in the race showed I didn’t step backwards despite not being as focused on running recently and I feel I am well positioned now to start building towards completing a 50 miler over the course of the next year.  Of course, being back of the pack means there is a lot of work to do, but I think my now improved strength to bodyweight ratio has me well situated to start that buildup and eventually go faster and further than before.