First, I love the pictures on the group home page. Thanks to whomever put them up there. Which leads me to my question: One of the photos shows a boardwalk path in a nice forest. My favorite local running trail is in a state park and they have installed several of these boardwalks in the muddy areas. During the dry season, they are no problem, I just run on them normally. In the wet season, which is about 8 months long here, the boards get as slick vaseline on ice. I've been avoiding my favorite trail because I have to stop running and carefully pick my way across several of these walks or I end up on my butt. The boardwalks aren't terribly level and some are damaged from blow downs, which adds to the level of difficulty. Since the photo on the home page would imply that someone has successfully run on these types of surfaces, my question is - HOW? If you have any tips or suggestions, I'd like to hear them as I'd love to log a few miles on this trail every week. Limitation - I won't go off trail as it causes too much damage to a heavily used trail and encourages the bozos to go stomping through the brush.

Landy - thanks for the photos. Those are some beautiful trails. I've done some camping and canoeing in WI and can vouch for it being one of the prettiest places in the US. I'm wondering if screw shoes may work. Anybody know how well they do with mud? Do they get all mucked up? The screws might help or maybe I could go with something slip on like yaktrax that would give a bit of extra bite into the wood. It's a 2 mile loop trail that I run laps on, changing direction for variety, and has lots of ups and downs. Plus, it's just a gorgeous place to be, especially in the rain. It beats the asphalt rail-to-trail that I'm currently running on and I won't even attempt to compare it to running down the sidewalk on city streets. Hope you are all having a wonderful New Year's day.