Escarpment Trail 2009:
4 hours 50 minutes. As I said to Doug at the finish, it was a tough day out there. It's a very challenging race in a really unique place, and so it was again this year: first the trail was extremely wet; the first 1/2 was much wetter than last year and the whole thing was very muddy, the first time I've seen it that bad. Second, even though it wasn't hot, it was near 100% humidity and I was popping salts and struggling to stay hydrated as sweat poured off with little or no cooling effect.
It was a miserable struggle for me this year, but I'm somewhat happy to have gotten in under 5 hours, over 30 mins faster than last year, and my knees both held up rather well, which bodes well for the future. In an attempt to get running room for the downhills and technical middle part of the course I ended up going out too hard - 50 mins to the top of the first climb (48 is my best) and even though I slowed way down, I was thereafter extremely slow on the uphills, even getting dizzy and nauseaus. I just tried to survive the uphills so that I could run the downs, and though it wasn't fun as it normally is for me I managed to do the last 2 mile section well, catching and passing 4 people. In the end, a too-fast start cost me maybe 10 mins, but it was the humidity and general lack of preparation that made it misearable. Following a 6 week period where I lost a lot of training and was the most exhausted I've been at any time in my life, and waking up this morning feeling lousy, I have to be happy with the outcome: I got myself over those mountains. I nearly wiped out twice, once tripping and putting a hand down, and once slipping at the top of the last significant cliff section you have to descend before the finish. I managed to recover that one well, but it could have been ugly since there was a 15 foot drop had I reacted wrong. That one might have gotten on video haha! For a while, before we hit the ledges that we had to descend, I was sort of pacing a first time runner who had never run trails of that sort, only cross-country in high school. He told me he'd fallen 5 times, and when I told him it was my 5th time running the race he couldn't understand why I kept coming back ;)
