I signed up for this only a few days ahead of time. I really was not trained for it at all, I’d only run one 7 mile hilly “long” run since I started a running break after twisting my ankle early in the summer. And that was last week. On a treadmill. I was just looking for something fun to motivate ramping up training for yet another 50 miler. So I was going to sign up for the 15k. But then I thought about the fact that I’d be out late anyway, the kids would be sleeping, and there would be stars. So why not stay out a few more hours given that I’m investing the time in driving to rodeo beach.
The race was great. It’s smack dab in the middle of a hundred miler, so there’s really no reason to complain about anything if you’re only running a marathon. Even if it climbs 5000 feet or so. I’ve never actually visited a hundred miler, so it’s the first time I’ve encountered some very fatigued “runners” in the early hours of the morning, Anyway, things hurt a lot, since I’ve been tearing out deep muscle knots to increase mobility and slowly rebuilding endurance to where it was a couple years ago. Running pirates cove at night with no moon was perfect. By about mile 15 I wanted to stay away from other runners to just enjoy the night out under the stars. I ran much more consistently than I expected, only hiking deliberately for efficiency as opposed to having significant fatigue or mobility things creep in. Set a strava pr on the hill I dislike the most out of everything in the headlands. Maybe even the entire Bay Area. It’s that climb from Muir beach up the coyote ridge trail, which has about 80 false summits. Ran all of the last downhill and into the finish. That doesn’t usually happen because there’s usually some muscle cramp around that time. Got some tacos and microbrew, chatted a bit, explained to a stargazong couple at the beach that yes, everyone really was running marathon up to hundred mile distance at 3am. And beat my only other hard trail marathon time. Of course, my only goal was to get some comfortably paced running time in at night under the stars. In that, I succeeded too.
