This post is a round up of my training for the Quad Rock 50 Miler (held in CO in May), my preparation for the Austin Marathon (in two weeks!), and life A.W. (after Whole30). Let’s dig in…
At the beginning of the year, I set out a few goals for 2018. Here I’ll provide a little update on how I am doing, now that we are one month in. Note that because it wasn’t one of my official 2018 goals, I’ll write about my experience attempting Whole30 in a separate post. So the goals…
Race: Go Beyond Racing’s Mt. Hood 50K
Location: On the Pacific Crest Trail and around Timothy Lake, in Mt. Hood National Forest, about 1.5 hrs from Portland, Oregon and at about 3,225 ft above sea level
If you follow me on Strava or Instagram, you might have noticed that I haven’t been doing a ton of running lately. I had the Bayshore Marathon a month ago, and then the Ultimate Direction Golden Gate Dirty 30 the following week (my first ultra! — here’s what I ate and wore). Since then, I’ve been in recovery/rest mode and adjusting to the heat of the summer. And eating Hello Fresh. But I have some news!
This past weekend I completed my first ultramarathon and and am no longer a trail runner wannabe! This was the first time in a very long time that I’ve gone into a race with serious questions about whether I would even finish, but *spoiler alert* I made it! I will separately write a post about what I wore, carried, ate, drank, packed, etc. for this ultramarathon in the mountains, but here are the normal post-race deets…
Race: Ultimate Direction Golden Gate Dirty Thirty
Location: Golden Gate Canyon State Park, Golden, CO. Approximately 45 minutes from Boulder or Denver. The race occurs between 7,500 to 9,500 feet above sea level.
The ultrarunning world has its own lingo, its own customs, its own podcasts, its own “major” races, its own stars, its own running clubs. It also has its own website: ultrasignup.com.
For the past few months, I’ve secretly held an account on Ultrasignup, lurking in the background without actually having run or signed up for an ultra race on the site. In other words, even though I’ve run a good bunch of trails, and even though I’ve fallen and gotten “best blood” on a run or two, and even though I took an official rite-of-passage full immersion dunk in the swimming hole with a crew of badass trail runners this past summer in Southwest Virginia, and even though I ran in Colorado in the dark and in the snow for the last few months of 2016, I am not an ultrarunner. I’m a wannabe, a noob, an interloper, a poser. But that’s going to change…
We don’t have bears in DC. We don’t have mountain lions. And we don’t have “curious coyotes.” But Colorado, my part-time home for the next few months, has all of the above. Oh, and rattlesnakes! Thus, I have sought running friends! Here’s where you can find some too if you live here or come to visit. (Please check these running groups’ FB pages and websites before showing up for a run; I will try to keep this current but make no guarantees about the continued accuracy of these schedules.)
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