back 2 back races

Doing back 2 back races/events is not anything new for me, not that I'm saying I do it several times a year or anything but it is something I've been known to do occasionally. However it has always been a shorter race combined with an endurance event, ie running a 5k or 10k on a Saturday then a sprint duathlon, a century ride, or a half marathon on a Sunday.  This past weekend I ended up running 2 longer distance races--the Sylamore 25k trail race followed by the Run the Line Half Marathon on Sunday in Texarkana.  Yes, I know the true distance runners are scoffing at my classifying these as distance events but let's not forget that even a 5k can be a daunting amount of miles for those starting out.  Heck, a 5k still scares me and that's my favorite distance to race.  

KT Tape and my new Brooks Running Launch trainers

I had no plans/illusions/goal times for the Run the Line half marathon, all I wanted to do was get there, get the distance done, collect my Arkansas RRCA Grand Prix point, and hopefully still be able to walk afterwards.  I told Julie and Luke (who I car-pooled down with) that I would be much slower than them (btw, I'm slower than those two in ideal conditions) and apologized in advance for the longer than usual wait time they were going to have because of me.  It was so hard waking up at 0345, feeling my left ankle throb and knowing that I was going to have to run 13.1 miles after a long drive--which I was just a passenger for thanks to Julie!!!!--but I had my goal and with KT Tape snugged around the cranky ankle I was all set (sorta) to get it done.

ummm, is that a bullet hole?

This was the first time for the three of us to run this race so we had no clue of where it was, what the course was like, the parking situation, etc but everyone I knew who had run it last year said it was great and we had no problems locating the place and everything went quite smooth with finding a primo parking spot close to the start line and the packet pickup.  The only complaint I could make was that there were 3 porta-potties outside and 2 of them appeared to be locked judging from the constant line of runners walking up and trying the doors and not being able to open them.  Thankfully there are facilities available inside the building where packet pickup was--yay for flushing toilets and hot water to wash your hands with!! Yes, that's a recurring theme for me, lol.  

Lots of hugs, lots of talking about my previous day's adventures, and lots of good lucks later we were off and running.  The first mile was all about getting my ankle un-stiffened up but once I did I was able to settle into a nice, steady pace, the good thing about the ankle was that I did NOT jack-rabbit this race like I have a bad habit of doing.  Also since I had no time goal pressure I was able to chat with other runners, the cyclists who were riding back and forth checking on everyone, and the volunteers at intersections and aid stations.  I generally make it a policy to say thanks to those directing traffic anyways but on Sunday they got smiles and "how ya doing's?" too, lol.  What I didn't have to do thanks to me carrying my Amphipod water bottle of Heed mix was walk the aid stations in order to get fluid (unfortunately I don't get any money/endorsement from those links, it's just what works really well for me) so I was able to keep my steady pace going.  Even the long-arsed incline on the busy roadway at mile 5-6 didn't slow me down an extreme amount.  Not saying I didn't slow down quite a bit, it just didn't hit me near as hard as I expected it to. Was very glad to see it end though, whew.  

That steadiness and feeling surprisingly decent lasted right through to around mile 8 then we turned into a headwind that sapped the energy right out of me. I still hadn't walked a single step and didn't have to until just before mile 10 where I took a piece of candy from a kid to try and boost my flagging energy.  Could only get down a couple of bites of the twizzler though.  After that I played the game of I'll run to the next intersection, mile marker, person, etc then take a walk break if I need to.  I WANTED to take walk breaks but was able to convince my brain to keep going.  Yes, brain.  While my legs were fatigued and it was getting very warm, it's more a matter of my brain wanting to quit rather than my body saying it had enough. Surprisingly during those last 2 miles of sluggery I was still able to keep catching and passing people and no, there were not any further walk breaks.  

I knew that I was keeping a decent pace thanks to the teenagers volunteering who called out the time and sometimes pace at every mile marker.  Yes, EVERY mile marker! That's something a bit different than any other race I've done and I kind of like it.  However I was still surprised to see the finish line clock and realize that I was going to come in under 2:05.  Don't ask me how I managed to put in a somewhat decent half marathon time on a bum ankle and the day after a 25k trail race because I have absolutely no clue myself.  A good bit of it was probably due to the not putting any pressure on myself to "race" on either day.  

Click to enlarge--mileage splits

My garmin mileage splits were quite interesting to me.  While it's not a negative split race, they are fairly consistent and much better than I expected.  The mile 14 data is skewed because I forgot to turn it off and there is some walking about time on there.  Needless to say, I'm happy with the result and it shows me that if I hadn't have ran 25k the day prior I would probably have gone sub 2 hours and might have even come close to pr'ing. Final stats: Gun time 2:03:17, chip time 2:02:58, 231/447, 13/44 female 40-44 age group, and 75/213 gender.

I thoroughly enjoyed this race especially the portions that were on the trail, crowd support was great, fantastic volunteers, intersections were well policed, and a gorgeous medal with an interesting tech shirt.  There was ample food afterwards, fresh grilled hamburgers and chicken with lots of condiments available and free beer from Hopkins Ice House.  I didn't receive one of course but the age group awards were cool-looking too.  A nice touch was posting the results immediately and they had a monitor scrolling through the results, showing overall finishers and where you placed in your age category.  

Such a cute moment

Finish Line disassembly

If you know Julie be sure and give her a huge congrats on her sub 2 hour half marathon finish.  She killed it Sunday!!! And this is all before her first year anniversary of running!!!!! She's also a cancer survivor and quit smoking approximately four years ago so there's an inspiration to get out and move if there ever was one.  My only whinge? She's in my age group, lol!!!!!!!!!  All kidding aside, I feel very privileged to have gotten to know her this year and look forward to seeing her ahead of me in many more races.

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Seen during a bathroom pitstop

Quick ankle update, I took Monday thru Wednesday off from running. Monday there wasn't much choice since I was limping and hobbling about but by Wednesday there was only a little stiffness left so all is good.

Race bling

Sylamore 25k report

Wearing my Dirty Girl gaiters

The late, more thorough recap of Sylamore..........I absolutely love this race and I put in a respectable time considering I didn't go in to do it for a certain time goal, my only plan was to have fun and finish it uninjured. Well, I succeeded on the fun part, lol.  And  really the injury part was fairly minor considering what I could have  ended up doing, this is NOT an easy trail to navigate.  For some reason my left ankle kept turning out on me, I counted 6 times that it occurred. The first time was fairly bad and that just set it up to happen again. And again. And again.  I was literally counting the occurrences out loud to Brenda but it was never bad enough to put me out of the race thank goodness.

Despite the ankle business, I adored this race. It's a gorgeous trail with lots of climbs, rocks, views that make you sigh at the beauty of nature.  Seriously cannot come up with the words to describe the awesomeness of it all.  This was basically a play day for me, I was there to finish but it was FUN.  The event pictures reflect this--all of mine show me with a goofy grin (we'll not discuss anything from the neck down though, grrrr).  The knee-deep creek crossing was as leg and foot-numbing cold as promised (which worked out great on the return crossing!) and slowed us down quite a bit on the way out........I'm gonna estimate that Brenda and I lost a good 5-10 minutes on the bottleneck here.  Robert & Michael on the other hand crossed over on a deeper section and got way ahead of us.

Once we finally got back on the trail and moving, Bren and I had 3 women in between us that were walking all the way up which brings me to my grumble about trail etiquette in the previous post.  If you're significantly slower than the person behind you or you have a faster runner flying down the hill towards you on his/her return section, step aside please.  It won't take but a moment, I promise it's not going to slow you down significantly and it's just good trail etiquette to do so on the single track stuff.  Oh and say thank you when someone does move over for you.  If the lead runners can say thanks, us slower runners have no excuse for not being equally as polite.  Another thing, mp3 players have no place out on the trails, you most definitely need to hear what's going on around you.  What if you go off the main trail (which happened to us more than once) and you can't hear people trying to tell you? There's also the not being able to hear runners coming up behind you and guess what, we are out in the woods, there IS a bear population in Arkansas especially in that area.  Ok, so the last is not a likely scenario but we do have bears.

The aid station rocked!  Great volunteers and yummy food, I've discovered that a small homemade brownie with a few salty chips (crisps for the UK crowd) makes an EXCELLENT snack for me.  No way could I do that on a road race but bring it on for the trails!!!!!!!!!  However, it does take a mile or 2 for me to get my breathing and pacing back on track after eating, feel and sound like I'm pushing it on a hard sprint but I'm lucky to be doing 15 minute miles, lol.  I gotta have the food though in order to keep my blood sugar from bottoming out.

Did I mention the scenery? It was almost enough to keep you distracted from all the climbing.  We were eventually rewarded with this fantastic, long, WIDE, albeit very muddy downhill, I felt like I was flying down that baby to get to the turnaround point.  Oh yeah, the turnaround.........it's this piece of pipe hanging from a tree with a plastic stapler thingamajig that you use to stamp/perforate your bib with. Only problem was that I didn't know what to do and I had to wait for the next couple of runners to get there and explain it to me.  I wasn't complaining though about waiting, we were right next to the creek again and there was a gorgeous waterfall to ogle just beyond.  I want to do the 50k just to see what it looks like, apparently the trail only gets more spectacular.  What I will complain about is the rushing water of the rapids made me have to pee like crazy and it was a couple of miles back to the aid station.  Yes I could have peed out in the woods but I really try to avoid having to do that if possible.  Besides there were REAL bathrooms available and hot water to wash my hands with after so I was determined to make it back, lol.

It was almost scary how great I was feeling at this point, I kept catching and passing people and was not showing any signs of fatiguing yet.  Yes, my lungs and legs were screaming with the uphill climbs but that was normal, I wasn't hit with the ohmygosh I'm not going to be able to go a step further feeling. I will say I was extremely happy to get back to the park where the aid station and bathrooms were though..........any further and I was going to have to drop my drawers out amongst the trees.  Bathroom business done, another small brownie square and some more chips, chat with Brenda and we were off again.  I do really enjoy running with her but especially so on the trails :-).

I did start to flag a bit on the extremely rocky areas before the creek crossing, it takes a lot out of you having to pay that much attention to your footing and to make sure that you haven't wandered off the trail but again I was passing people, mostly those who didn't stay as long at the aid station as I did.  The lead guys from the 50k were also catching up to us 25kers so there was a fair bit of stepping aside to let them by.  Extremely inspirational, they were working hard but still looked like they were enjoying themselves.  Surprisingly I caught up to Michael during this section just before the creek, he was suffering from some calf cramping unfortunately :-(.

Ahhhh, that creek crossing. I was actually looking forward to it in order to numb my left ankle somewhat before the last push to the finish and boy did it do it's work.  It had also risen to be mid-thigh deep so I got more wet than what I'd planned for, eek.  I wasn't the only one who'd been anticipating the numbing effect, there was a guy just standing there when I entered the water who said he'd been needing that for the past mile or so because his knee was giving him trouble.

Out of the water, through the field past a group of teenagers who were all loaded up with packs for an overnight hike and I get to the parking lot and have no clue which way to go!!!!!!!!!!! One of my bad habits when I run with a group is that I don't really pay much attention to the route.  I had to wait for the next runner to catch up and ask, so embarrassing!  The route by the way was straight up a dirt road, with a near vertical climb, a level spot, then a climb again.  There was a Camaro and a Dodge Charger--parents of some of the teenagers who were camping overnight-- and they were having to crawl up that hill.  I walked part of the first climb then ran the remainder up but it was a struggle.  I think I impressed the guy driving the Camaro though, he waited at the top of the dirt road for me to reach the pavement, rolled down his window, and told me "good job!".  Even if he was taking the piss, it is still awesome to hear something like that at a hard part in a run.  Made my day anyways.

I thought I would hate the pavement section, I certainly did on the way out to the trail but once I got on it I knew it was the home stretch and I just let my legs do their thing.  It felt so good to be on an area where I didn't have to worry about where my feet were gonna land and just go on auto-pilot.  Even cooler than the guy in the Camaro was kicking it in and over-hearing a couple of people talk about how strong I looked headed for the finish line and actually feeling THAT strong.  Huge kudos to Robert who had an amazing race & time, he looked like he could have ran another 25k easily and he beat me in by over 20 minutes.

Final stats: 3:54:10 total time, 3:30:26 moving time. 123/202 finishers, 27/64 female, 9/19 female 40-49 age group.

The ice bath aftermath

Sylamore 25k

I adore trails. What more can be said? Not sure I'm up to a full-blown race report tonight but I am a very happy albeit very sore runner tonight.  Oh and I get to get up even earlier in the morning and head for Texarkana to run a half marathon on the road. Don't think I'm gonna enjoy it near as much because I'm nursing some achy muscles tonight.

So in the interest of trying to go to bed early, I'm only putting up a few pics & stats tonight.

Out and back course

My garmin charts 

The splits

Watching the 50k runners head out

Amazing house on the hill

I'm a finisher :-)

There will be a longer post tomorrow night or on Monday with waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more details and a bit of a brag and nag about trail etiquette.  My tired arse is off to bed. Hope everyone's weekend runs/workouts have rocked.

seize the moment

............and blog when the mood hits you otherwise you'll end up like me this past week and have some great ideas but then lose them or the "want to" to write anything at all.  Bah. 

I've had some great runs this week, all of which have challenged me to go faster or longer than what I felt or thought I could, all of which were with some amazing friends.  That always makes the miles go by faster even on days like yesterday morning when I was feeling light-headed from not eating enough on Wednesday (not on purpose, just had a lot going on and kinda forgot that I needed to eat occasionally).  Even with that and a walk break, Isabel and I managed to kick out 6 miles in 56 minutes with the last 2 miles being the fastest.  Throw in a couple of short but fairly intense trainer sessions and some major core work and I feel like I'm getting back in serious mode with training. Finally.

My new Brooks Running kicks--the 2012 Launch

Hopefully I will have some great posts to write up over the weekend. Tomorrow I'm running the Sylamore 25k for the first time.  It will be my 2nd trail race and I hope it goes much better than the Full mOOn 25k did back over the summer.  I'm certainly better trained for this one distance wise but the creek crossing kind of has me worried since there's been so much rain here.  Apparently it's just slightly longer than 25k too, as in 17 miles as opposed to the 15ish it should be.  Guess I'll find out tomorrow, lol. 

As if that wasn't enough, I decided earlier in the week to sign up for Sunday's Run the Line Half Marathon in Texarkana since it's also a grand prix race. I am NOT trained up for back-to-back long runs, eeek.  But I'm not planning on "racing" either event, more just getting out to get the distance done and see if I survive.......Yep, color me stupid.  Please cross your fingers and wish me luck!

full mOOn 25k

It may not seem like it but I actually still am running.......just not any great distances right now. I'm ranging in the 23-29 miles per week but the longest I've done lately since the middle of May (the 14th to be precise, approx 12 miles) has just been under 7 miles. So what does one do when their truck has to go into the shop (again) for a prolonged period and a friend asks if you want to do a 25k despite being woefully undertrained for the the distance? Well, after asking what the cost is (free, donation only) and if I can catch a ride (yes), why then there is only one possible answer--of course!!!!!!!!!!!!

Being silly pre-race. Belted up, light on cap and funny bump under shirt was my 2nd light clipped to my jogbra 

The problems with that answer? Besides the undertrained bit, haha.......we're going through a hotter than usual summer and I'm trying to adjust to a birth control pill that is tri-phase and the first 1.5 weeks of the cycle makes me horribly nauseated, to the point where I'm actually throwing up once or twice and guess what phase I'm in right now........yes, I'm contacting the NP to see about going off these.

Our not so motley crew :-)

So back to the full mOOn 25k, a fair number of our running club was there and I got to catch up with other friends whom I haven't gotten to see in far too long.  I do miss racing and getting to hang out but it's just not in my budget right now for the race fees and cost of gas to get to them.  A lot of giggling, catching up, hugging and asking each other how crazy/stupid were we for showing up at an event where the starting temp was well over 90f and we were going to be running in the dark on forest service roads where there are entirely too many snakes and the occasional mountain lion sighting (5 people reported seeing one last night by the way).

The early starters getting the pre-race chat

Although the plan was for our group to stick together I knew in the first mile that I wasn't going to be able to hang on to them. Shoot, I knew it was gonna be something for me to even make it to the 25k turnaround point, lol.  Heat, humidity, nausea, and the nothing but uphill (which lasted over 4 miles) killed me and I bid Andrea, Brenda and Robert adieu just before the 2 mile point along with telling them I hoped they didn't have to wait too long for me at the finish. Thus began the run/walk and constant leapfrogging of other people doing the same for the next 13 miles. Maria, one of our newer running club members caught me and stayed with me for a while but I even had to shoo her on forward.  She was having too good of a race to be waiting around on me, lol. However she did wait around on me at the 7.5 mile turnaround at the water and food stop and a HUGE thanks to her again for filling my water bottle with ice while I was waiting in line.

The great thing about trail races is that nearly everyone talks so in between the long solitary hikes some good convos were had.  Don't ask me about what though because it's all a haze now.  I do remember being told that I was a very fast walker, all I could think was I NEEDED a walker at that point, lol.  Chatted to a couple of 50k entrants that decided to fall back to the 25k distance, found out later that quite a few decided to opt for the shorter distance due to the heat.  I know that I was sorely tempted to have my first ever DNF more than once last night :-/.  Screaming quads, a very cranky right foot, and the freaking never-ending nausea was near to doing me in.  Too stubborn and stupid by far though to give in, just kept moving forward walking, running when my stomach would allow.

Elevation map of the 25k

A finish line was eventually found along with the 2 best ever cups of ice cold gatorade I've ever had in my life followed by a quick dip in Lake Sylvia to wash the salt off--quick of course is very questionable....and now the boring, nitty-gritty stats per my garmin

Distance: 15.02 miles

Moving Time: 3:10:11

Elapsed Time: 3:16:34

Average Pace: 12:52 min/mile

Fastest pace: 7:47 min/mile (where the heck did that come from?)

Total Elevation Gain: 1,609 feet

Other interesting things of note, lots of snakes were seen (by others) and there was a mountain lion sighting by 5 of the runners.  I was still down almost 4 pounds this morning despite having taken in more fluid than I ever have during an event (excepting cycling centuries) and so much water I'm wearing a constant path in the floor to the downstairs bathroom (stairs hurt for some reason today, lol).

Sandwiched by one (of several!!!) of my favorite couples