Notes
I decided to try out some trails in Merrimack I saw looking around the map, Horse Hill nature preserve. Overall pretty good! Trails decently wide in a good amount of places. A lot of smooth-ish / clear-ish single track. Feels pretty similar to Musquash. Longest trail is a 4.4 mile loop, not bad. It took me two tries to find the full loop though. The signs in some spots are faded. Found it the second time easy enough and now I think I've got it down.
Pretty fun to run these trails fast - lots of technical but manageable places. Bugs weren't too bad - had a couple flies chase me for long enough to be annoying but it was only small portions of the run. I did get a bunch of gnats on my chest / arms / legs though, Frear Park workout style. Oh and the GPS distance might be off, I find it hard to believe I did two loops and didn't at least get 6 miles and change. Meh.
Oh, and I tried my Altra Lone Peaks today for the first time. For the first few minutes, wow they felt heavy. But after that I forgot about that and they felt pretty good. Definitely overkill for this trail but I wanted to see how they'd do before Gunstock. Long run should be fine in them.