I had adjusted my expectations for the run based on this increased difficulty and decided that it I could finish in under 7 1/2hrs that I would be happy with the result.
I'd been planning to see Addy, a friend that I've been chatting with online since we found each other on a forum and discovered that we'd both been running the PCTR Woodside run at the beginning of February and hadn't realized it at the time. She's a senior at UC Berkley and preparing to attend Grad School at UCSC in July. She's only recently started running trails and is doing a fantastic job with her running and her weight loss program, using SparkPeople.
The weather wasn't that great in San Francisco yesterday. We have a low overcast and some brisk winds. With all the hills that we climbed paired with the low overcast, we were actually running in the clouds for a good portion of the day. It was interesting watching the mist being blown sideways across the trails ahead of us.
We started at 8:30am, or there abouts, and the 30k and 50k competitors were off together, since we all complete a 30k loop before the 50k runners head back out for an additional 20k loop.
There were probably 200 runners in that initial wave. More than half of them were only running 30k, which meant that I had to be careful not to latch onto one of them and find myself out of energy for the second loop.
All the weight I've lost recently certainly seems to have helped my performance, though. I was able to slowly run up the initial hills and stay with, or ahead of, some of the runners that I would normally trail far behind. I ended up playing leaf frog with one guy, Chuck Wilson, who I've met a many, many runs before, until I finally pulled away from him after the 30k aid station and didn't see him again until after the finish. I was very impressed with myself.
There would have been spectacular views of the SF Bay area, Sausalito, and the Pacific Ocean, even the Golden Gate bridge, if we could have seen more than 100 yds ahead of us. The course was still spectacular, though. We had a mix of fire roads and single track trails. Oh, and then there was the beach, too. Ugh! Black sand that didn't clump together, no matter how close you get to the waterline. So, at the end of both loops, we had about 1/4 mile of trudging through sand in order to get from the bluff over to the parking lot and the finish line.
My final time? 6hrs 11min. A personal best by 11 minutes. This is incredible really, since I only just set a PR at my last 50k in February, and this was *such* a more difficult course.
So, in celebration, I've uploaded some more progress photos to my SparkPeople gallery. I think my weight loss has played a really big part in my running performance, so I'm again looking seriously at a Boston Qualifier this year. Here's one of the photos I took today to celebrate my race and my terrific accomplishments with weight loss.
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