I’m back! Sorry it
has been a while, been pretty busy with
the wrap up of race season and just haven’t had the time to sit down and
write. So since we left off last I had
just finished the Quad Cities Marathon just missing my BQ time of 3:05 by 47
seconds... man, seems like so long ago already… I’m already 4 races past that
event and I’ll hit the big two over the next two posts, let’s get started…
THE RUNNING VILLAGE
50K – October 11th -4:10:15
The 50K at the running village was my first introduction to
ultramarathon trail running and I got to say I took to it like a fish to
water. I had more fun during this race
than any other race I can remember to date, it was truly more of a mental
relief from all the road racing I’d been doing it almost felt like a mini
vacation run haha. I went into this one
with no plans, no specific training and no tapering whatsoever, I literally smashed
this between two 60+ mile training weeks as I was just running it for fun. All
that being said the 31 mile total was not a big stretch for me as I’ve
completed many runs of 26 mile distance this year… I’m looking forward to some
longer ones in the future.
The course consisted of a ½ trail mile leading up to a 10
mile loop of dirt track that stretched through the woods at George Wyth park in
Cedar Falls/Waterloo. It was a cold day, temps hanging right around
30 degrees, getting up to around 50 by the end… I was very happy to run in the
cold after that miserable finish at QC Marathon so I was not complaining one
bit J I started off running very conservatively and
even backed off on my pace two or three times over the first lap as I just wasn’t
feeling that hot, luckily about 7-8 miles in I started feeling like my old self
and consistently dropped pace and pulled negative splits on each of the 10 mile
loops.
With the exception of those first few miles which I figure
was just my body warming up, I felt just plain amazing the whole race and had
an ear to ear smile right up to the finish.
After finishing the race I had a little trouble digesting water which
has become pretty standard for some reason… normally the hour or two following a
race I will immediately throw up any liquids I try to take down, this will be something
I’ll research a little further in the off season. But other than that felt great and immediately
started plans on tackling a 50 mile race in 2015… any suggestions would be much
appreciated!!
Lastly, it was awesome to see a lot of runners from Dubuque
make their way to Cedar Falls for this event.
There were runners from both the DRC and the Driftless Dirt groups and
it was just a great time to hang out with everyone and swap stories on the
trails… Dubuque over the last couple years has really developed a great running
community with multiple running groups filled with good people/runners of all
calibers that are a lot of fun to hang out with!!
