Goal: Top 10
I wasn't planning on running this race until a few weeks ago I volunteered for another trail race and I got two free entries for two trail races of the 2013 series. I got all excited about running trail races, especially after the Bourbon Chase fell through. I didn't specifically prepare for this one, and the race came at the end of a 58-mile week, only the second in a row of large mileage weeks, so I was not recovered. But I didn't care that much and I thought I can still be in the top 10. I previewed the course so I knew where the hills were. The main thing that worried me though was that the trail is very technical, and the older I get, the worse I get on technical terrain. Not that I was that good to begin with...
We woke up to a gorgeous late summer morning, temperature in the high 60s, which I guess is not good for me considering that I tend to suffer less from heat than my opponents. The race was held in the beautiful Bernheim Forest and Arboretum. It was a point-to-point course, so at the beginning buses took people up the hill and we ran down back to Guerrilla Hollow (close to the Visitors' Center). I was lucky enough to get a space in a car of a friend of a friend, so I was up on the hill in no time. The race started a little late, but that was expected due to the 100 runners, who had to be taken to the start line.
We started on a fire road in the woods, but in 50 yards, the course took a right turn onto a singletrack trail. I wanted to be close to front runners, and I took the turn in the 4th place. The first mile was mostly downhill, so I pushed myself really hard, finishing the first mile in about 6:30, which is no simple feat on that technical course. Maybe I paid for that later. In any case, I let a few people pass on the subsequent uphill mile, and then settled into a pace and a strategy that I thought I could keep by the end.
Well, it didn't happen. One by one, people passed me and I never saw them again. Typically this happened on the climbs, where I had to walk many times, because I felt exhausted and mentally weak. But even on downhills, I wasn't very fast, and some runners gained on me. I gave up two more positions in the last mile, one, to a 56 year old guy, who was barely faster running uphill than I was walking, but I could not run. I finished in 12th place with a time of 59:40. Age graded is even much worse: 17th place. An old rival beat me by more than two minutes, so that he actually took a wrong tun and lost a bunch of time!
I can try to find excuses, but at the end, this is what it is: a pathetic performance. This kind of trail racing is probably not for me, but even then, I should have done better than this. So it might be all for the better that I won't be able to race Siltstone in November (family schedule), but instead I will race the LSC Half Marathon again. It would be really cool to PR in that hilly race, maybe running a 1:23, but it seems like a long shot with my recent performances...
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