Tussey Mountainback

Yesterday was the big race: our 6-man, 50-mile relay race. I'll post the complete results when I get them, but for now here's the story of my own personal effort.

We each ran two legs of the 12-leg event. My first leg was four miles, all downhill. I cruised the whole way, although I had to stop for a moment to correct a "wardrobe malfunction" (damn shoelace!). But I did pass some poor girl twice: once before the shoelace, and then again just after. I finish that segment in 27 minutes, which is a blistering (by my standards) pace of 6:45 per mile.

The thing that was difficult about this race was that there was no warm-down time. As soon as you finished your leg, you handed off the little bracelet, checked in, and then jumped into the van to move to the next transition area. There you would have some time to stretch and stuff, but I could already feel my legs tightening up. I did my best to try to stay loose over the next couple of hours, until my next leg.

Leg two for me was 2.8 miles, the first half downhill, and the second half uphill. This leg had an interesting start: first someone's support vehicle almost clipped me because they didn't look when they pulled out. Then I got stopped (yes, stopped!) behind a logging truck trying to squeeze around the parked support vehicles on the narrow mountain road. I finally found a seam to run past the truck, and he didn't pass me until a good half-mile down the road. I lost about 20 seconds to the truck, and I think I ran a little too hard to make up for that time.

Anyway, I hit the midpoint and started going up hill. Believe it or not, it actually felt really good to be going uphill. Running downhill is tough on your quads and lower back, so the change shifted the focus off of those over-taxed muscles. The good feeling didn't last though, as I started dying right around the two-mile mark. I was even thinking of walking for a bit when I saw the "1/2 Mile to Transition" sign. My, it was beautiful. The other difficult thing about this leg was that I was running alone for most of it, so there was no to use for pacing. Finally just before the transition I came up to a pack of slower runners, and somewhere found the juice to pass them just before the hand-off. The tank was on "E" after that. I finished that stage in a disappointing 21:20, for a 7:36 pace. I had really hoped to run that closer to 20 minutes.

Our team finished in 6 hours, 19 minutes, or 11 minutes better than Dale had predicted. I'm guessing that we were in the top half for our group, but the results have not yet been posted. It was a fun day on the mountain, and I would definitely do it again.

Next up: the Knights of Columbus 5K on October 9.