Writing.Com General Discussion

Grabbing his hand, she raced past gnarled trees.

I'm in favour of using the word gnarly here, because it doesn't dampen the sentence by imprinting a sense of past tense at the end. It also lends to extension of the sentence. This is an action sequence, so sentences want to be short, but there is very little happening in this one, so fill it with her senses to add power and weight or bring those trees to life by adding anthropomorphic concepts to them through her perceptions.

e.g.:
Grabbing his hand she raced past [use of 'the' here kills momentum] gnarly trees, whose roots seemed in that instant to conspire to trip her and make her progress slippery.

Note the use of 'instant' rather than 'moment', because it is more imperative. Note also the roots are not conspiring against her, it is her perception that they are, keeping us anchored with the subject of the sentence.