This was a storm race. I like to have one good bay area winter storm race each year. But you can't really plan them, especially since I need to reserve the personal time at home a little early. This one lined up well.
Mud. Rain. Hail. Climbing over downed redwoods. More mud. More rain. More downed trees. A park crew cutting up the downed tree on the way back. In the rain.
This was a very different ultra, both physically and mentally. I got physically tired, but never had any muscle pain. All the hard training leading up to TNF50 helped here, as well as getting back into hard training during the holidays. I probably took the first climb too fast. But I had some stuff in my head to burn out.
On the mental side, I never really tuned out. I had a lot on my mind going into this, and it's the first time I haven't managed to clear it all out during an ultra.
I finished in 6:30ish, whatever it was. That's not why I ran this one. I also had a lower standing than expected for this kind of time (my fastest on a course of this difficulty), but there were a lot of distance drop-downs to avoid the far loop (and probably a fair number of no shows) given the weather.
Three things up:
* Incline trainer time really helped with hip climbing endurance.
* Training through a race worked well here, sitting at a consistent ~40 miles a week at the time.
* I ran with compression shorts for the first time on a long race--this worked much better than anything else I've tried. Not for any compression benefit to anything performance related but to manage skin irritation.
Three things down:
* I let my heart rate run higher than usual for a while. Probably not the best thing overall.
* I could have probably drank more water, but I didn't really see a bad affect from it.
* I dunno. It was a pretty great race for what I wanted out of it. I guess maybe the fact that I hadn't run a local 50k in 10 months; they're fun. And I might not again for quite a while--I've been trying to balance among athletic goals a bit more since Spring 2015, which means I'm no longer compulsively running local 50k's.
https://www.strava.com/activities/476965202
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