St. Croix Running Company

St. Croix Running Company St. Croix Running Company coordinates several foot trail races in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Taper week does something strange to your head.For months, the training itself keeps the nerves quiet. There's always an...
09/06/2026

Taper week does something strange to your head.

For months, the training itself keeps the nerves quiet. There's always another long run to think about. Then the taper hits, the miles disappear, and all that leftover energy has nowhere to go except straight into your thoughts, where it turns into anxiety, and sometimes into a quiet search for a way out.

Chris wrote about this ahead of his Superior 100 start this week, the twinges that show up out of nowhere, the small aches that suddenly feel like evidence, and the other runners who told him it's more universal than he expected.

If you've got a race on the calendar this fall, whether it's Icebox, Trout Brook, or In Yan Teopa, this one's worth a read before your own taper week hits.

(Link in comments)

Taper week has a way of making you doubt everything you built. The miles stop, and suddenly a weekend with friends feels...
08/29/2026

Taper week has a way of making you doubt everything you built. The miles stop, and suddenly a weekend with friends feels like it’s undoing months of training.

It’s not. The work is already banked.

New post is up about trusting your training when the taper anxiety kicks in, and why sometimes the best thing you can do two weeks out is to show up for your people instead of your training log. Link in comments.

Mark Dowdle just won the Last Soul Ultra after 395 miles and 94 hours on a 4-mile loop, and something he said afterward ...
08/22/2026

Mark Dowdle just won the Last Soul Ultra after 395 miles and 94 hours on a 4-mile loop, and something he said afterward has been living in my head all week:

"Every step is evidence. The story in your head is not true. Forward. Forward."

I’ve been sitting with that line on every run this week, easy days and hard ones, and I think it’s the most honest description I’ve heard of what a hundred miler actually asks of you. Not fitness. The willingness to trust what your body is doing over what your mind is telling you about it.

I’m a couple of weeks out from Superior 100 — my first attempt at the distance since Zumbro in 2016 —, and I wrote up what this quote has meant to me this week, the doubts it’s surfaced, and how I’m planning to use it out on the Superior Hiking Trail.

New post is up. Link in the comments.

There’s a stretch of fall out here that we’ve built our whole calendar around. Three races, six weeks apart, each one a ...
08/16/2026

There’s a stretch of fall out here that we’ve built our whole calendar around. Three races, six weeks apart, each one a little different, but all of them built for the same thing: get outside, test yourself against something real, and stand around afterward with people who get it.

We start September 26 at Frontenac State Park with In Yan Teopa, a course with over twenty years of history and bluff views that stop you mid-stride. Six weeks later, October 10, Trout Brook takes you off the familiar trails at Willow River and into tight single-track most people never find. And we close it out on November 7 with Icebox, our timed endurance event at Whitetail Ridge, where the only question that matters is how far you can go.

You don’t have to run all three. But we’d bet one of them is calling your name. A new post is up on the blog with the full breakdown of all three races.

We line up for races that will hurt us on purpose. We train through cold mornings we could just as easily skip. And some...
08/09/2026

We line up for races that will hurt us on purpose. We train through cold mornings we could just as easily skip. And somewhere along the way, a lot of us started treating that as a burden instead of what it actually is.

This week’s blog is a reminder that most of the world doesn’t get the choice we get. Not everyone has the body, the time, or the circumstances to voluntarily make their life harder for a finish line. That’s not something to complain about. That’s something to be grateful for.

Full post in the first comment. Would love to hear how this lands with you.

There’s a version of “burn the ships” that’s genuinely useful in training — deciding ahead of time that today isn’t up f...
08/02/2026

There’s a version of “burn the ships” that’s genuinely useful in training — deciding ahead of time that today isn’t up for negotiation, so the tired voice in your head never gets a vote.

And there’s a version of it that’s dangerous, if it means you’ve also trained yourself to ignore real warning signs from your body.

This week’s blog is about the line between the two, and why it matters just as much for a 5-miler as it does for a hundred. Link in the comments.

Heat wave got you dreaming of fall? Same.Trout Brook is not Willow’s fall twin. It’s a different race on a different cou...
07/26/2026

Heat wave got you dreaming of fall? Same.

Trout Brook is not Willow’s fall twin. It’s a different race on a different course, ten miles of technical single-track through the corner of Willow River State Park most people never find. Climbs, stairs, a waterfall that stops you in your tracks.

This park is my backyard, and I’m excited to share it.

📅 Saturday, October 10, 2026
📍 Willow River State Park, Hudson, WI
🔗 Register: https://ultrasignup.com/register.aspx?did=132870

Deep in the biggest training weeks of my Superior 100 build right now — the kind of weeks where the calendar says 26 mil...
07/19/2026

Deep in the biggest training weeks of my Superior 100 build right now — the kind of weeks where the calendar says 26 miles and your whole day is supposed to bend around it.

Then an old friend called last Saturday and asked if I wanted to come up to his cabin, where a group of us who had been inseparable in college was getting together for the first time in years. I said yes and moved the run to Monday.

Almost twenty years into this sport, here's what I’ve learned: it’s easy to let a race goal become who you are instead of just something you’re chasing. The miles pile up, the training talk takes over every conversation, and slowly, the people who knew you before any of this started competing with a training plan for your attention.

The race doesn’t love you back. Old friends who still call to invite you to places do.
This week’s blog is about that balance — what it costs when we let training swallow everything else, and why some of the best training we do happens nowhere near a trail. Link in the comments for the full read. Would love to hear how you all find that balance in your own training.

Ever had your body pick the most inconvenient possible moment to remind you it’s in charge?That happened to me a few wee...
07/12/2026

Ever had your body pick the most inconvenient possible moment to remind you it’s in charge?

That happened to me a few weeks ago, midway through Superior 100 training. New post is about listening to your body and showing up healthy, whether you’re training for a 5-miler, a 10-miler, or a 100-miler.

https://www.stcroixrunningcompany.com/blog/show-up-healthy

Address

Hudson, WI
54016-7641

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when St. Croix Running Company posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to St. Croix Running Company:

Shortcuts

Share

Category