Where’s the peanut butter?!

So last Saturday was the 13 mile Cougar Mountain Trail run. Holy shit it was hard. Most of the run itself was super, super fun but the course was very hard. This was the second time I’ve done a race on a trail. The first was three weeks earlier in Fairbanks, but that course didn’t prepare me at all for this trail run. There was another 1000′ of elevation gain at Cougar Mountain and 2500′ more of net elevation gain (the Fairbanks run started in the mountains and lost 3000′). Also, the Fairbanks run was on a large, wide ridge road with beautiful views of the Alaskan mountain ranges, whereas Cougar Mountain was a single-file trail weaving through a canopy of trees and constantly going up and down switchbacks. Speaking of the switchbacks - they are *hard* to run up. Early in the race I though I’d run the entire thing, but I got to sections where basically everyone was walking and I realized that by trying to run I was just expending energy raising my body into the next step but not actually moving any faster than the people doing a quick hike up those inclines. So if I saw people walking, I walked, too.

My time (2:17:00, 41st out of the 204 people who ran it) feels a little disappointing. I originally thought “I’ll crack 2 hours.” Hah! That would have put me in 8th place and was way unrealistic for me for this course. So as I was getting into the run and sizing up the terrain I thought “OK, if I aim for 2:10:00, that gets me just under 10 minute miles.” This was the goal I really wanted to hit, then, and the fact that I didn’t is why I’m a little disappointed. But when I’m out pushing myself up an incline now and I start feeling a little lightheaded, I don’t take any chances so there were times close to the end where I just had to decide to not take a chance with my health and let the time go. Not that I needed much convincing because I was definitely working hard and there’s nothing like a run like this to get your head to feel like it’s going to explode from the pressure, anyway. At the end of the race I met a fellow ChuckIt member who I was under 2 minutes behind and he has qualified for Boston so that was encouraging after feeling like I’d backpedaled on some (really unrealistic) goals.

So overall it was a great experience and I’d love to do it again. One other observation about the race: the entry swag they offered was a pair of running socks with the race series knit around the ankle. They’re really cool! After getting a nice UPF 40 hat from the run in Fairbanks I’ve realized a couple things about longer runs - all of which I really like:

• You get way better free stuff from longer runs! If I never get another cotton t-shirt, that’d be fine by me.
• The field for longer races is incredibly different from who typically comes out for a 5K (however there are certain 5K’s which still attract a unique crowd…).
• Way fewer people enter for longer races