The Timmins Golden Trails Half Marathon (8-10)will be my next race. I ran it last year and found it to be a nice course, but almost never flat and on a paved surface at the same time. Today I included the second half--the dirt trails part-- of the course in my run and almost took a spill twice on the trails.
Lesson: Don't run steep downhills within 48 hours of a long run! My quads seem to recover slowly this year, and this course has some X-country type hills on the trail: short but rugged. The first half is mostly a slow ascent on the streets, but was a lot faster for me. As slow as the course feels, the finishing times were not bad last year...only slowed by a couple of minutes for many. Might be some generous GPS readings.
EDIT: 2008 is longer by .6KM
But it's not a PR course, that's certain.
I'll have to run the trails weekly now to be sure I don't take a header.