Lake Sonoma 2016 race report

Warning:  May contain whining!

On the surface, all went well with my race.  I had a good result place-wise (9th, in a very competitive field) and a decent time (8:37) considering how hilly the course is.  Beneath the surface, however, was a disappointing day.  My training for Lake Sonoma carried on from the solid base I had built up for Bandera.  I recovered quickly from Bandera and started my Lake Sonoma training with some nice endurance weeks.  Then it was a couple of speed workouts and two short races.  One of these, a 12k on very hilly dirt roads, was possibly my best short race ever, which was definitely encouraging.  After that I still had time for a couple more weeks of endurance, and I finished off the training period with 29 miles on an especially hilly section of the Appalachian Trail, feeling strong and fast the whole way.  I was ready to race.

Gentle jog on the course with Divesh the day before the race

Race day morning appeared promising, with cool rainy weather, a good night of sleep, and a big breakfast. But just a couple of miles into the race, I began to notice something odd:  I seemed to be running unusually slowly.  As always, I was pacing myself by heart rate.  I wasn't wearing a GPS so I couldn't say for sure how fast I was moving, but it certainly didn't seem to be a particularly quick pace.  I was aiming for a heart rate of 155 to 157, compared to the 150 I use for training, but my race day pace felt slower than a training run.  When I arrived a full five minutes late to the first aid station at mile 11.6, there was no denying that something was wrong.

I started up the hill out of the aid station and tried to convince myself that I just needed an extended warmup and that things had to improve.  But they didn't.  I trucked along at my 155 bpm and arrived at the mile 20 aid station eight minutes behind schedule.  My legs still felt completely fine, it just appeared that my lungs had decided to take the day off.  At this point my limited supply of patience ran out.  I decided that if it was going to take running at 160 to 162 bpm to go the speed I wanted to go, then that was what I was going to do.  I turned the pace up a notch and tried not to think about how I was ever going to maintain this effort level for 30 more miles.

The new pace allowed me to claw back about five minutes on my goal splits, and I arrived at the turnaround in 4:02, only two minutes behind schedule.  Things seemed to be looking up; my legs, and more importantly my stomach, were feeling good, and I was starting to pass a few women.  My morale got a boost when Meghan Hicks informed me at mile 30 that I was now in 10th place.  Maybe this day could still work out okay...

There is that saying in ultrarunning that it never always gets worse.  I would add the caveat that this is true except when it does.  By about mile 35, my legs were thoroughly unhappy with the effort level I'd been attempting to put in for the previous few hours.  I started walking up a few of the hills, then moved on to walking up most of the hills.  I arrived at mile 38 about 12 minutes late and with far too little energy in reserve for that tough last half marathon.  As beautiful as the Lake Sonoma trails are, I have to admit that I was sick of them by a few miles into this last section.  Everything had become an identical blur of rolling hills and curves, with no real way to know how far we had left.  Somewhere in the last two or three miles I asked Loren, a guy who had been alternately in front of and behind me for several miles, whether he thought we would ever get to the finish.  He didn't think so either.

The only thing propelling me along at a pace resembling a run was that I'd seen Anita just a few minutes behind me at mile 45 and I knew it would take a big effort to stay in front of her.  Each time I was tempted to walk an uphill, I'd remind myself that Anita was most certainly not going to be walking that hill, and I'd press on.  Finally I rounded a bend and could see I was about a quarter of a mile from the finish.  I attempted a sprint, which felt suspiciously like the same pace I'd just been running at, but I had nothing left and for a second I actually started walking.  Loren, who was just behind me, yelled at me to get going and not let him pass me.  It was a very welcome push that got me across the finish in a reasonably respectable manner.  Even if, as I suspect, he did let me "win"!

So what went wrong?  It certainly wasn't my stomach, and since my pace was slow right from the start, it can't have been a lack of calories.  It also doesn't seem to have been anything about my training, since I felt so good in nearly all my runs the past month and then had a nice taper.  I did start to feel a bit of heavy legs the week before the race, but that was gone by race day.  My best guess at the culprit for the bad race is either the humidity--I have mild asthma and one of the things that exacerbates it is humidity--or that I was anemic.

To counterbalance the whining, I will say that it was an incredibly fun experience to run an entire ultra with no nausea.  Let's repeat that next time, please!  It was also satisfying to stay somewhat mentally in the race even after I was physically done for.  And last but very much not least, John, Lisa, and all the volunteers put on an excellent event, complete with top-notch postrace food that I was thrilled to be able to sample for once!  I may need to make at least one more trip around that lake in the future.

We got to meet Deirdre and Seth for a postrace dinner--I had to try not to be too jealous of their impending Kalymnos trip!

Bandera 100k race report, by the numbers

1,423:  Miles that my parents drove to come be my support crew at the race

1:  Number of people who purely coincidentally rented the other half of our holiday cottage in Bandera and who I know from Scotland!

46:  Temperature in Fahrenheit at the start.  Perfect.  It got hot later, but only because of the intense sun.

10/10:  Beauty of the course at sunrise and sunset

3:  Feet in the air that I jumped after something large and brown slithered away from where I had just stepped, around mile 35

2:  Times during the race that I swore I would never run another ultra

0:  Times during the race that I wasn't enjoying the course.  It was perfect running the entire way; just the right amount of technical and non-technical sections.

4:  Vomiting sessions during the race.  Less coffee for me next race...

8:  Miles of the race that I was struggling

54:  Miles of the race that went well

3:  Square inches of my legs not sliced to pieces by the sotol plants lining the Three Sisters hills

1:  Sotol needles I got stuck in my finger and then proceeded to stab myself with when I put my hands on my legs to walk uphill

1/2:  Radius, in miles, that the World's Most Annoying Dog, who someone had brought to the start/finish area for the entire day, could be heard barking nonstop.  This actually helped me out twice during the race.  First, it provided great motivation not to linger at the start/finish area when we passed through there at mile 31.  And second, near the end of the race, just as I was starting to get frustrated by the fact that there was STILL no finish line in sight, I suddenly heard...yap!  yap!  yap!  and knew it was time to sprint.

+50:  Difference between number of calories I was wearing at the finish, courtesy of a leaky bottle of sports drink earlier in the day, and number of calories I actually consumed during the last 9 miles

+55:  Minutes of positive split on my second of the two 50k laps--ouch!  Goal was no more than 30 minutes...

0:  People who passed me on the second lap

2:  Minutes by which I missed my goal time

11:01:  My finishing time

5:  My finishing place

7/10:  Happiness factor for my race.  I made a mistake by overdoing the coffee and by not wearing a hat to protect myself from the intense sun, which might have kept me from overheating so badly, but I did have a good first lap without going out too fast and a reasonably strong last ten miles.

11 hours of crewing is a long time!

Magic Wood and Margalef

After spending some quality adventure time on the Long Trail, I moved straight into a few months of getting back to the basics with my training for running.  I noticed at the White River 50 this past July that one thing I was severely lacking, compared to runners who finished just ahead of me, was basic speed.  For quite a while during that race, I was running in a train with two other girls and it was pretty clear that while we were all temporarily going the same pace, that pace was much easier for them than it was for me.  So I took three months to focus on speedwork:  sprints and strides, leg and hip strengthening exercises, and plyometrics.  Word of advice, go easy on the plyometrics if you haven't been doing them regularly--I was nearly broken after my first, and highly overenthusiastic, session!

The three months of speedwork were mostly a success.  I got a new PR in the mile (5:49 in a road race), and I could see that my stride had improved.  But although I truly love going to the track and running short fast repeats, one thing that is missing from a steady diet of speedwork and road racing is variety.  So, it was time for a climbing trip.

I arranged to meet my friend Dave at Magic Wood, in Switzerland, for a few days of bouldering, and then we would drive from Switzerland to Catalunya for about 10 days of sport climbing at Margalef.  I'd never been to Magic Wood before but it only took about an hour at the crag before I was telling Dave that we had to come back soon.  The climbing is just excellent there.  There are a lot of problems with rough landings, which normally isn't my thing because I'm very protective of my ankles, but the amazing rock quality made it completely worth it, plus there were plenty of problems to try that had perfectly good landings.  I surprised myself by getting up a 6C called U Boot, and then had a day to spare to go around trying other problems that looked good.  This was one of them, although the sit start was a lot harder than it looked and will need a return visit!

Photo:  Dave MacLeod

  Dave had even more success there, seeing off his 8B project much earlier than planned and then topping that off with another 8B on the same night.  We also had another type of success:  beautiful weather every day and super scenic running.

After Magic Wood it was time for some Margalef action.  I've got a 7c (5.12d) route there that I've worked on occasionally over the past few years, but this year I had decided it was time to do my best to get it done, and I trained specifically for it for three months before the trip.  I arrived in Margalef knowing that I probably hadn't managed to get trained to anywhere near 7c but that it would still be fun to give the route a try.  The first day was...not promising, to put it mildly.  It was still way too hot for climbing at the crag, my route was far steeper and harder-looking than I remembered it being, and I had forgotten how difficult it can be to block out the noise of the vans, dogs, and climbers at Laboratorio in order to still get some climbing done.  I was so discouraged that I told Dave that I might be making this a running holiday instead of a climbing one...which to be fair is no bad thing since Margalef is also home to my very favorite running trails in the world.

Fortunately, the second day on the route brought a lot of improvement.  It sounds a little ridiculous to talk about improvement when I still couldn't actually do any of the first three moves on the route, but I knew there was now a tiny bit of hope.  Those first three moves are the crux, and there are several possible methods of doing them, so I spent a long time experimenting with different options and finally found one that looked like it was going to work, courtesy of a video that I found online of someone doing the route in a particularly unlikely-looking way.  Unfortunately, by this time, there were only two days left in the trip, and one of them needed to be a rest day.  On the last day, I pulled on and did the crux first try.  I fell off soon after, came down, and had another go--and made it to the last of the hard moves.  I knew my sequence was a bit uncertain here, so I spent a long time trying a section of about ten moves or so, and Dave supplied some key beta that got me a solid chance of getting through that last hard move.  But my arms had nothing left, and my day was over.  Time to go back ASAP...