I had been planning on taking it easy at the Mt. Mist 50k and just enjoying the day, so I was looking for an excuse to run slow. At about 1 pm the day before, that excuse came. A few of us are always on the lookout for ways to spice up races, especially races like Mt. Mist that we do every year and have courses that we know pretty well. It is a great course with vast majority single track trails (probably less than a mile of pavement), three substantial climbs, a plethora of smaller hills, and plenty sections of ankle-breaking technical trails, so three of us came to the only logical conclusion: we should run the course in reverse starting at midnight the night before the real race. Like I said, having a 31 mile warmup sounded like a good excuse for me to run slow. So at midnight Friday night (or Saturday morning, depending on how you're looking at it), four of us set out to run the course from the finish back to the start. Rob Youngren, another doubler and a venerable trail runner, did the same double a few years ago, but this was the first time in reverse. The course was marked pretty well will flags, but, because he knows those trails better than the rest of us and is much much faster than us, we let Rob lead. The first 14 miles (the last 14 miles if running the actual race in the proper direction) contained two of the three big hills, which warmed up our quads nicely going down, but, as is always true in running, what goes down must come up. One of these hills is called Waterline and has a portion of hand over hand climbing, which was interesting to go down (those that have run this will really appreciate the thought of going down Waterline at night in the rain). Other than Waterline, the first 14 (commonly known as the 2nd half) went relatively smoothly. At the approximate halfway point, Blake Thompson proved that he really is smarter than the rest of us and called it a night by taking the short jog back up the road to Rob and Kathy's house to sleep. Rob and I pressed on, as did Josh Kennedy, who proved himself to be a trooper, running most of the first loop by himself. The next 17 went by as well as could be expected; the only problems we had were the occasional bouts of windy freezing rain/sleet, which aren't problems so much as slight discomforts. Another feature of the reverse course that proved to be interesting was the ascent up Warpath Ridge (again, other Mt. Mist runners will appreciate the thought), during which Rob smoked me and had to slow down at the top to let me catch back up. Once at the top of the ridge, the next six miles were on noticeably easier trails, and before we knew it, we were done with the first loop in 6:51:05. As a side note, the wildlife was a captivating feature of the night loop. At one point, we looked around, and with the light from our headlamps, we could see ten or twelve deer on both sides of us staring right back from about 15 or 20 feet away. We saw a couple of skunks (thankfully we didn't excite any of them too much), and with only about two or three miles left, a coyote ran straight into Rob's leg and then back into the woods. The second loop (the actual Mt. Mist race) started at 8 am, which gave us about an hour to change out of our cold, wet clothes and convince ourselves to do it again. The whole second loop was an exercise in will power. Needless to say, my "excuse" worked; I did run the second loop very slowly. Fortunately, the actual race was pretty uneventful for me; no falls, no cramps, no turned ankles, just the ever-present mind game trying to simultaneously convince me to quit and keep going. The only time I really thought about not finishing the double was about 20 minutes before the actual race (second loop) started, and fortunately Rob, Kathy, Blake, and Josh convinced me to keep going. I ran a large portion of the second loop with Josh, going back and forth between who was in front (he ended up beating my by around 5 minutes), and I know that provided some much needed motivation for me, and it might have for him as well. In any case, once I got to the "halfway point" at mile 17, I figured that I had gone that far, and since there wasn't anything really physically wrong with me (notice I didn't say mentally...) I might as well push through the fatigue and finish. I don't know what the official cutoff time is now, but I know that it used to be 8 hours, so my goal was to finish under that, and I wasted a whole three minutes, because I finished in 7:56:57, which produced my 100k time of 14:48:03 I will go ahead and chalk this one up as one of my more eccentric running adventures, given my complete lack of planning and almost whimsicle participation. All in all, however, I'm glad I did it, and who knows what's next... I'm a little stiff
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