31 July - 13 miles (95 minutes), in the evening, Patterson Park/Canton/Fells/Fed Hill. (Was only planning on doing 10 miles, but felt oddly fine, so I went a little longer . . .)
1 August - 4 miles (30 minutes), at APG (lazy lazy)
2 August - 1 mile (10 minutes), at APG (super lazy)
3 August - Treadmill hill workout - 1698 feet of climb in 4 miles (35 minutes), plus 1 mile total warmup/warmdown (10 minutes), followed up a few hours later with 15 miles (105 minutes) around Baltimore City, in circles that seemed endless, except for the parts where I sped up to chase down other runners (ad hoc speedwork?).
4 August - 5 miles easy (35 minutes) from SURVICE Engineering, Belcamp on my lunch break, 15 more easy miles in the evening around Baltimore City (105 minutes)
5 August - 10 miles (70 minutes) around White Marsh Mall, plus, I found a really awesome power line cut:
6 August - 32 (?) miles (50K plus a little), Dahlgren Heritage Rail Trail 50K, 4 hours, 10 minutes, some-odd seconds (250 minutes), 6th place overall.
Total Time: 735 minutes
Total Distance: 100 miles
Okay, now the race report:
"Fresh" off of last week's 6-hour run adventure in Astoria Park, I found, after a few low-mileage days this week rid me of the delayed-onset soreness in my quads, that the wanderlust had me again. So I hit up the trusty ultrarunning.com website for suggestions for the weekend, and lo and behold, the system works: Dahlgren Heritage Rail Trail 50K. Although there was some indication that the terrain was iffy, at least it would be flat (on account of being a rail trail), and perhaps a chance to re-PR this year at 50K (my previous best being the 4:19 that I ran at Seneca Greenway in early March). Maybe even (dare I say it) a chance to pull out a win - although 50K isn't my strongest ultra-distance, the fact that the course was relatively flat, and the course record, at a shade over 3:50, relatively "soft," meant that barring some superhuman competition coming out of nowhere, I would be in the mix for one of the top spots. The promise of a barbecue after the race was enticing, too. :) Anyway, all good enough for me to get up at 3 in the morning and make the 2-ish hour drive down to Dahlgren and the Caledonia Nature Zone, or whatever they call it. (If nothing else, the early-awake thing was good for randomly running into a lost cat outside my house, which rubbed up against my leg and emitted the most well-enunciated "meow" that I've ever heard a cat make. Delightful. :) )
I was first in line for race-day sign-up, and was pleasantly surprised to see how organized their operation was. After a briefing at 6 a.m. that warned us of the "bullet impact zone" on the western out-and-back, we all milled about uncomfortably for about 15 minutes until it was time to line up and wait for the gun.
The gun went off, and I went out slightly in the lead. My legs were feeling surprisingly okay, considering that I had run 50 miles in the past three days, a substantial portion of which was not particularly slow, so I hung on where I was across the field, out to the road, and down the steep hill to the rail trail. I bombed down the short single-track stretch so fast that even though I had clearly turned in the direction of the arrow, I put so much distance on the pack so quickly that I wasn't hearing footsteps, and was temporarily concerned that somehow I was running the wrong way. A quick turn of the head confirmed that there were a few other runners hard-charging after me, so I thought it best to turn around, keep sipping my Gatorade and downing my Endurolytes, and concentrating on running strong on the sloppy terrain.
It is at this point that I should mention that, on paper, this is a PR course, because it is so flat. In practice, this is no NCR Trail - it's ragged, littered with gravel, rocks, downed branches, all on a sandy bed. Nice cushioning, but not exactly built for speed. It takes a fair amount of concentration to achieve road-like speeds on a surface like this, which, except for maybe a mile total (intermittent throughout the race), never lets up. So, in all fairness, this really is a trail race (unlike races on the NCR . . .)
I reached the eastern turn-around in the lead, with runners gunning hard just behind me, but I managed to maintain through the next aid station, at around 7 miles. When I stopped to fill my bottle, one guy passed me, then another, and another . . . For whatever reason, I was hitting a rough patch, and struggling to keep my pace. I put my head down and soldiered forward, and, to my surprise, I pushed through, and by the time we were about three miles into the western turn-around, I was back up with the leaders, and feeling somewhat better. We made the climb up the single-track re-routing around the gun club (which seemed pointless at the time, but was a nice break for the muscles that were handling the brunt of the work for the majority of the race), and down the gravel road back onto the trail, and continued towards the western turn-around point.
It was somewhere about 3 miles from the western turn-around that thing started to fall apart. The fatigue from the past three days of heavy volume, the humid heat (80-ish degrees, 75% humidity), and the ragged terrain turned my stride from smooth to struggle. Four people passed me. Now in fifth place, I did what I did the last time that this happened: I soldiered ahead, albeit at a slower pace, and concentrated on nutrition/hydration. At about a mile from the turnaround, I stopped losing ground at an alarming rate, but I came into the turnaround feeling wrecked, and concerned about the 11 or 12 miles that I still had to run to complete the race. I took about a minute at the aid station to eat half of a banana, drink some Coke, and generally collect myself before I started walking from the aid station back down the trail. After about 5 minutes of walking, I decided that this was no way to end the ordeal quickly, so I began to run again. After a while, I slowed to a walk for another couple of minutes, and that was when Karsten Brown caught me. Sixth place now, but determined not to throw in the towel, I kept pushing forward, with the occasional walk break, but I limited myself to a minute or two, except for the climb around the gun club, which was now alive with the sound of shooting. Bullet impact area, indeed - fortunately, no impact on me.
This continued for a while, until the end of the race. Okay, that sounds stupid, but seriously, in the last five miles, my legs were tired - not so tired that I couldn't run, but tired enough that I felt like I didn't have the extra gear that I needed to mount a chase. I still managed a finishing "sprint" for show, crossing the line in just over 4 hours and 10 minutes, with Paul Jacobs less than a minute behind me, although I had no idea at the time (had I known, perhaps I would have tried to make the latter portion of the race less lazy). For my efforts, I got a glass imprinted with the race logo, for alcoholic beverages (probably), and the option to swap out my green t-shirt for a purple 2011 t-shirt (which I exercised). Oh right, and there was a barbecue, but it was hard to enjoy, because with all of the Gatorade, Coke, bananas, and Endurolytes, combined with the humidity, killed my appetite. So I mostly sat there with Chris Avedissian, a friend who had come out to the race, talking about nothing in particular and greeting the other finishers as they stumbled in to Shelter A. After far too many hours of that (when I left, the clock was at 7:30; the race time limit was 8 hours), I packed up what little there was to pack up, and went home.
Overall, I'm pleased with my effort. Since the "soft" in the course record turned out to be more in the trail surface itself than the time, I didn't feel too bad about my finish (hey, it was a PR), although I did feel a little bad when it turned out that the winner was "only" about 15 minutes ahead of me, and third place was just a few seconds under 4 hours. Considering that the last 3 miles took me about half an hour for no good reason (other than being tired and adopting a "training run" mentality at that point), that was 6 minutes lost right there. At any rate, for last-minute, un-tapered effort, it was another good call, another good training run, another fun adventure, and . . . another pile of swag: :)
No comments:
Post a Comment