Year 2, Week 23 Wrapup

I had a race on Saturday, so I thought I would take it kind of easy this week. Unfortunately, things conspired to turn "taking it easy" into "no running at all this week".

On Saturday was the "Everyone Runs Catalina State Park 5.5 & 10.75 Mile Trail Race". A couple of months ago, a few guys from my ward had made a plan to all do the 5.5. I thought it might interfere with my marathon training a bit, but figured I would do it anyway and call it a rest week or something. At the time, I had no idea of knowing that almost all of my weeks would be rest weeks.

Friday night, it started getting really cold, and by early Saturday morning, it was raining a lot. I was concerned that it was going to be too cold, the trail was going to be too muddy, and I was going to be too tired because I couldn't get to sleep at an early enough hour the night before. If I hadn't already pre-registered, I most certainly would not have actually gone.

Since I had pre-registered and was intent on getting my free (i.e. already paid for) tech shirt, I dragged my sorry butt out of bed at 5:30 and drove up to Catalina State Park, which is about a half hour away. It rained a little on the drive up, and by the time I got to the shuttle loading zone, it was raining pretty hard. I waited in my car for the shuttle bus to get there, and thought that if the rain didn't stop by the time the bus got there, I was going home. The rain did stop, but about 10 seconds later, it started hailing. Fortunately, that only lasted about a minute, and everything was clear by the time the bus got there.

When I was hanging out before the race start, I saw Adam Lebrecht and his dad, Steve. The Lebrechts were our next door neighbors growing up, and I hadn't seen either of them since Adam's wedding a few years ago. They're both serious runners, and Adam had come down from his home in Avondale to visit his folks for Easter and to run the race.

It was great catching up with them. When I was a kid, Steve and a few people in the neighborhood would go out running every morning. Every once in a while, maybe once or twice a year, my dad would decide it was time for me & him to start exercising. He'd make me get up early with him and go out and run with the running group. I could never keep up, and usually couldn't run more than about 1/4 mile before petering out. My dad's commitment would usually only last about 3 days, then it was back to my usual slovenly ways. Since I started running seriously, I always hoped I would run into one of those guys from the neighborhood so I could tell them, "Look, I'm a runner now". It's probably best that I saw Steve at an actual race, because had he not seen me actually cross the finish line, I'm not sure that he would have actually believed it.

Right before the race started, I saw Matt Rhodes from my ward. Evidently, everyone else hadn't bothered registering thinking it would be full, or else just didn't want to come on such a cold rainy day. I hadn't run with Matt before, so I didn't know if he was good or what. He's skinny enough that I thought he might be pretty fast. I still wanted to beat him for ward bragging rights, but with all of my recent non-running, I didn't know if that was in the cards.

The race started, and we took off down the trail. It really was a nice course. There were only a couple of stretches that were narrow enough to be single track, and one really steep section with a bunch of stairs. But, other than that, it was pretty gentle desert paths. The trail wasn't muddy except in a couple of spots where you had to run around some standing water in a wash. I led Matt for maybe the first mile and a half, but then we turned around into a downhill stretch and said he was going to take off to take advantage of the downhill. That was more than fine with me, because at that point I was nursing a strong side stitch and some non-specific bowel pain.

Since I didn't know how hilly the trail would be, I had decided that just finishing at under a 10:00 pace would be enough for me. I had every intention of running the whole way, but just after the halfway mark, I came to one of those "no, I don't think so" hills that everyone was walking up. After I got up the hill, I was feeling a little better, so I picked up the pace a little bit, finishing just a couple of minutes behind Matt.

I ended up with 51:52, good enough for a 9:25 pace and 84th out of 325 overall. This got me 9th out of 17th in my division. It was not a good race for me, but it was better than could be expected given my recent lack of training.

Afterwards, they had smoothies and a mexican breakfast (eggs, beans, tortillas). The line for smoothies was pretty long considering how cold it still was. The line for the breakfast was even longer, but it was totally worth it. The salsa was quite possibly the best I've ever had in my whole life.

So, overall, it's a good race, but there's some definite logistical problems to sort out. Parking's very limited at the start, plus there's a $6 entrance fee to get into the park, so they were pushing the shuttle service pretty hard. That's great, except that after the race, there was no place for the shuttle bus to turn around, so you had to walk a half mile down the road to catch it. With my luck, I walked half a mile down the road and got on the bus, only to find that the bus driver was going to try to get up to the finish line and turn around there anyway. This was a great idea, except there still wasn't a place to turn around, and we had to sit on the bus for about 15 more minutes until some booths were moved so that the bus could turn around. All this to get to my car which was really only about 2 miles down the road.

On top of all that, there was nothing to do with your belongings once you got to the race. If they really want people to shuttle away from the cars on such a cold day, they need to have a bag check to check your sweatshirt, poncho, gloves or whatever. I think the fact that it was so could made more people relucatant to leave their car, making more people try to drive in, making it more crowded at the finish, making it even less likely for the bus to be able to turn around. If I were to run this again, I wouldn't mess with the shuttle unless they fixed the way it works or did a bag check. As it was, I was lucky that I found Adam there, because I was able to throw my hoody into his car.