Hiking In Fountainhead Regional Park

In the second installation of our campaign to test out new hiking gear, my husband and I took our new hydration packs hiking in Fountainhead Regional Park.

Occoquan River

Hiking In Fountainhead Regional Park

We took advantage of REI’s annual Memorial Day Weekend sale and purchased the rest of the gear on the “equipment” list for our multi-day hiking vacation in August. While we both have hydration packs for running/cycling, we needed packs that could hold more stuff—extra layers and a day’s worth of snacks. 😉 I like shopping at REI because you can try everything on, and since we are “members” there is a generous return policy.

I was eager to try out my new pack but wary of how my cranky hip would respond to hiking, so I looked for an easy hike close to home. That led us to go hiking inFountainhead Regional Park—an even closer to home park I’ve never been to before.

There are three major sets of trails at the park: equestrian trails, mountain biking trails, and the trailhead for the 19.6 mile Bull Run-Occoquan hiking trail, which connects Bull Run, Hemlock Overlook, Bull Run Marina and Fountainhead Regional Parks—we’ll tackle that one another day. I plotted a 5ish mile hike along some of the equestrian trails as a more moderate adventure.

I loved that the trails are marked with horseshoe-shaped blazes!

Fountainhead Regional Park is less than 45 min away on a Sunday morning. The day was going to get warm, but when we started out it was in the lows 60s. The trail was mostly in the woods, with a few stream crossings.

Although we started hiking at the trailhead for the equestrian trails, I immediately took a wrong turn and we ended up doing the “White Trail Loop” before starting on the hike I had planned. After that unplanned loop, we opted to do an out-and-back on the equestrian trails (instead of another loop) to keep our miles reasonable. My hip was doing fine, but I didn’t want to push my luck.

Note the bonus loop at the top of the map!

The first loop had some steep sections, but the rest of the hike was pretty “easy” with moderate changes in terrain.

By the time we got back to our car, we had hiked 7 miles.

We knew our Annapolis Rock hike also had been 7 miles, and were interested to compare our Garmin data. My husband was confused because his data showed about the same average pace, even though the terrain was quite different. When I checked mine, that data also was identical!

Annapolis Rock

Fountainhead

I’m excited to have “discovered” Fountainhead Regional Park, and look forward to checking out the other trails.

Weekly Run Down

After hearing so much about it from Deborah, I decided to try RK’s Split + Hike program. There are four classes, each programmed as 30 min of strength + 15 min hiking (tread walking on a steep incline).

The strength classes are programmed as hypertrophy splits (upper push, lower push, upper pull, lower hinge) and I definitely felt the burn. The lower body squat day left me with the worst DOMS I’ve had in ages. You think you’re doing squats regularly until you take a whole class focused on squat variations!

Wednesday was an “off” day for the program, so I took Scooby out for a short walk+run to celebrate Global Running Day.

My hip wasn’t really happy with this celebration, but the rest of my body enjoyed it.

Saturday I tried a 30 min walk + run class. Again, my hip wasn’t happy with the running, so I was generous with the walking intervals.

A huge thank you to Deborah and Kim for hosting the Weekly Run Down link up.