Saturday, I ran the Pick your Poison 50k Trail Race.
Confession time my training has not been where I wanted it to be. I’m about 140 miles behind, with little hill work. And two weeks ago I got a nasty little head cold after my DNF at Seaton Trail and missed running 2/3rds of the week.
Still I went into this race not feeling too bad.
Race takes place 20 minutes north of where I live at a Horseshoe ski resort. Naturally I arrived an hour and a half early.
Met up with some of my group, most doing the 12.5k or the 25k versions. Only 1 other doing the 50k.
As well some RunningFree teammates were there as volunteers/crew. And although I usually am pretty self sufficient one of my teammates crewed for me, which I really appreciated and thank him for.
Course consists of a 12.5k loop, mostly on trails on the back sides of the ski hills.
It had rained most of the previous week, so I was expecting some muddy trails.
At 9 we were off. Everything was going well until we did one 3k loop. As we were coming out of the loop, I could see some runners who had been in front of me starting back into the loop. I could see the trail going off in the opposite direction and actually asked a marshal about going in that direction. He said that was for the next time around. So I did the loop again. Turns out he though we had to do it multiple times instead of repeating it each loop. There was an aid station at the start/finish of the loop and they told runners to skip the loop the next time they came through. They missed telling me, until after I finished it a second time, so told me to skip it on my third loop. I said thank-you very much, but if I was allowed to skip it once, I was going to wait until my last loop.
Two weeks ago, we were dealing with hypothermia. This time it was quite warm with a lot of sunburns, especially the volunteers.
While there wasn’t much, the sun did dry up a lot of the mud, leaving one boggy section and a couple of snow banks to cross.
Course ended up a little long at 51.5k (including the inevitable detours).
Nice shirt and a jar of locally produced honey for registering. Not sure if it’s safe to eat anything you get from a race called pick your poison. Fortunately there are young guinea pigs, I mean people in the house. And socks instead of a medal for finishing.
As with not being acclimatized to the heat and my lack of hills, my quads were trashed and I didn’t do as well as I would have liked. But every race can’t be a good one, and I survived without injury.
