MST 50K was a bit of a strange race for me… The 1st half, I was pretty down on myself, but in the end I turned it around and had a great result.  I tried to capture my thoughts in an email to Lucho so I’ll just include those here:

First half negative thoughts:

• this effort is to hard for the pace I see on my GPS
• this course is too runnable — I need hills where I can power hike!
• I’m much more suited to Uhwarrie
• the turn around was actually a lollipop so i couldn’t see where the front runners were nor how I was doing

Second half turn around

• I put on music which may have helped distract me from negative thoughts
• someone finally yelled out I was 15th, and I realized I wasn’t doing as poorly as I felt
• I started passing a couple of runners and started gaining confidence
• my avg pace on my GPS was not going down

I ended up passing 8 runners on the way in and finished in 7th overall…  With almost an even split.  Strava race analysis:

Results:

More people ran negative/near even splits than I expected — at least compared to Uhwarrie 40!  I’m quite happy with just the 4 minute difference…

Food:  4 vfuels, 4 date rolls, 1 small cup (2 oz?) of Mountain Dew, for a grand total of < 500 calories in just under 5 hours

Gear — nearly the same set up as Uhwarrie…

In that same email to Lucho I also outlined my dilemma on running the Jordan Lake 12 hour 6 days later:

Jordan Lake 12 hour

PROs

1. it’s on what I consider “my trail” – my favorite that is close by
2. Last year I was leading up to maybe hour 8, even though I was fighting a painful stomach (I had been in Mexico right up until Monday of the Saturday race!
3. Last year’s data:  https://www.strava.com/activities/288073632
4. Great training for the 100 — though this race only does the front half of the trail which is not nearly has hill as the back half
5. It’s a loop course so it’s easy to stop running any time…
6. I’ll be in Europe next week (PRO and CON) but the PRO is that this trip is likely to have little to no time to run as I’m in London a day and a half then fly to Munich a day and a half then back to London one night at the airport before flying back home!

CONs

1. Is my body ready?  Is it too risky?  (injury/fatigue)
2. Risk of mental burn out — 3 big runs in 3 weeks, though the 1st two have been good so far, even with the negative 1st half of the 50k I turned it around…
3. The race would be over at 7 p.m. and I have to be on a flight to London all night, 23 hours later
4. Time away from family the day before I fly to Europe for the week  
   1. (Though my wife may run on a relay team and the kids would be out for part of the race most likely and maybe my son would even do a lap with me later in the race now that he has his cast off.)

Lucho and I discussed on the phone and we decided to see how the week played out.  I ran three miles each on Wednesday and Thursday, and the Thursday run I was starting to feel good, but stated I didn’t feel ready to run 2 or 3 hours at MAF come Saturday.   Lucho responded, but you’ll have to read the next post to see how that panned out.  🙂