Fast start, some muddy singletrack where I took my first ever race header, 10+ port-a-john stops (not including the ones pre-race and last night), sunny and warm temps (70F+), a sandy leg with "puddles" 50' long and up to my knees deep, and a death march that began at about mile 10. I'd write more but I have to finish packing, collapse, and get up at 3am to catch a flight back east. Maybe more tomorrow. ---------- Well this race hurt. Still does as a matter of fact. Race morning began with an early rise at 4am in order to drive to the finish, catch the shuttle to the start at 7:30 outside of the Carbon river entrance of Mt. Rainier. Unfortunately, this merely compounded the sleep debt I've been accumulating this past week and I was dog tired race morning. But I guess race morning really started with one of the several trips to the bathroom I had to take starting the evening before. As I found out after the race, it hit my wife later race morning afflicting here similarly (worse, I suppose, since she actually threw up), but I'm getting ahead of myself. None of this really sank in, as I toed the line anxious to start (very cold in the shadow of the start canyon), aiming for another sub-7 finish. I felt pretty confident about my chances in this race. First, it's a net downhill with the only advertised uphill at the very start of the race of about 100+'. Second, I've run portions of the course before; specifically, the paved portion of the Foothills Trail from South Prairie to Puyallup and Puyallup River Trail. Last, training has been going pretty well and since I now knew what to expect from a 50 mile race, I figured I could go out a bit more aggressively. Run concurrently with a 12 stage relay, I was really hoping to run in the 6:45 +- 15 minute range. Leg 1 was about 5 miles on the road, with the uphill portion followed by more downhill. My slowest/fastest splits probably tell the story here: 6:38 & 7:37. Yup, I was out pretty quick and settled into 5th place. Leg 2 is where the story really begins. Advertised as the first of 3 "remote" sections that would be "muddy", I completely and utterly underestimated what that meant. Leg 2 was really a beast.....muddy single track is a kind description. I had flashbacks to the cross-country mudfest I'd experienced a couple of weeks ago in the UW Pack Forest. The trail was extremely technical so even in the spots where the mud was relatively tame, rocks, roots, undulations, turns, streams, logs, and brush all conspired to slow the pace. So did whatever reached up and grabbed my foot, sending me skidding in the mud. Fortunately, my water bottle softened the blow and I wasn't too worse for wear. Unfortunately, I didn't heed yet another signal that my day was likely to be a long one. Oh, did I mention that if someone crashed and burned on this stage, the medical plan involved packing them out on donkey's that were pre-staged halfway down the trail with some medical staff? Awesome. Leg 2 is also where my bathroom woes would continue. I'll spare the gory details, but by my count I had to stop no less than 10 times to use the facilities, and not the quick kind. Along with the sudden biological urges I was having to deal with, the stomach began an immediate rebellion against my first GU. Dehydration combined with a side of no carbs. Excellent. Legs 3 and 4 mellowed out some and we got some ATV trails mixing in with the singletrack, putting the gnarly leg 2 behind us, but still taking a lot of energy to navigate. On the bright side, my decision to wear the Montrail Rockridge shoes that I'd bought and run exactly 4 road miles in actually worked out....I can't imagine trying to navigate those three legs in road or road-trail shoe hybrids. The dark side was that the potty-breaks and stomach woes continued and I was quickly getting to the point where I was going to drop. I bargained with myself to get to mile 20, the South Prairie aid station where our first drop bag was stashed, and then drop, so that I could give good directions to Dianna and she could come and pick me up (not knowing that she was busy camped out near the bathroom). So mile 20 arrives and I just can't bring myself to drop. Can't do it. Really, really want to but feel like perhaps these are just a few dark miles and that things will settle down. Managed to get some boiled potatoes and a bagel down, so I figured going one or two more aid stations would be okay. Maybe I could get a 50K in and not feel so bad about bailing out then. Mile 20 also started the paved trail so I swapped out the muddy Rockridges for some nice clean Adrenalines. The paved trail also started the virtual end of the shaded section. The downright chilly start had given way to a rare sunny cloudless day in the Pacific NW. Let the cookoff begin. Enroute to the start, I'd realized (along with everyone else in my shuttle) that I'd forgotten sunscreen. I'm still paying for that.....walking thru the airport the day after was not pleasant with a laptop backpack bag pulling on my lobster-like shoulders. In any event, I was still managing to average 7:30-7:40s through mile 28, except for those miles that involved a potty stop. Then, mile 29 hit and the wheels official came off. I don't even think I realized it at the time. 7:30s gave way to 8:30s (and eventually to a few 9+ miles). Walk breaks started occurring outside of the aid stations and the true bargaining began. Just get to the next aid station. Run a mile then walk for a few seconds. Get to that crossing road. It was ugly. It didn't help matters that by this time, garmin was telling me I'd gone 1+ mile more than the official distance. 1 mile worth of bathroom breaks? Don't think so, but seeing how the official distance was 50.8 miles, the idea of having to go to almost 52 was really not sitting well at this point. Yet still the competitive streak in me was alive. Having no clue where I was in the standings after starting off in 5th, I finally noticed what was on the boards at each aid station had runner's numbers and their passing time. According to the board at the last checkpoint on the Puyallup River Trail, I was only in 6th and the next competitor up was only 6 minutes ahead. Maybe they were hurting worse than I. After finally clearing the Puyallup trail system we hit one more trail section, where sand, not mud, was the enemy. Packed and hard occasionally, soft and loose more frequently, this section was a complete energy sink. Then came the "puddles". Looking back at the course condition reports the week prior to the race, they were described as long but not spanning the full width of the ATV path. Well, evidently the rains of late had swollen their size because after avoiding a few of them, I found myself wading thru knee high muddy water for 50+ feet at a time. Fun. The last part of the course was the ugliest running thru some industrial areas in Fife before scooting through Tacoma and on to Ruston. Either paved road or concrete sidewalks, I couldn't manage more than 8+ minute miles with frequent walk breaks. Truly the death march phase. About the only good news was that the potty breaks had ceased because I hadn't been able to really eat much of anything for a while, and I was downing the liquids as fast as I could. It's all a bit of a painful blur of a memory to the end, my only memory being finally catching the 5th place ultra runner (who actually was hurting worse than me) to move into 5th overall and 3rd in the Open division. So a 7:46:23 finish. Not even close to a PR but in hindsight, the course was harder (in spots), the weather worse, my body wasn't rested (or entirely well), and I went out too fast to all contribute to a sub-par performance. I did get a pretty cool railroad spike for 3rd place in the Open division, so that was nice. 24 hours later though and I still feel tired and sore, so I don't imagine the recovery will be quite as quick as it was from Mt. Si. On one hand, this really scares the bejesus out of me with White River 50 coming up in July. Legs 2 through 4 really tore me up and there wasn't really any significant elevation change to deal with, which there will be at WR50. On the other hand, perhaps a meltdown now will help temper my enthusiasm there so that I don't hit the death march stage until later in the race. We shall see....
| 