Race Report & Recap

It's been almost a week since the Vista View race, and I can't believe I'm finally getting around to posting a race report.  Normally, I'm so excited to share the details that I write up a whole synopsis the day of the event.  Obviously, running for close to 6 hours totally wiped me out!  Anyway, let's get rolling!

The race was awesome!  I loved it, and this was probably the most fun I've had while running and attempting to be "competitive."  Maybe that's the key to why it was so fun, even though I was "racing," I really had no expectations because this was my first ultra and I had never run for more than 3 hours and 50 minutes before.  Other than wanting to keep moving for as much of the 6 hours as possible, I had no real expectations of distance, pace, etc.  It was rather liberating to go into something so "free."

Hans & Morgan were incredibly gracious and offered up their guest room to me so I could drive down the night before the race.  It's always nice staying with other runners because when you say at about 8:30 that it's time for bed, everyone gets it!  We were all up by about 4am and out the door by 5am.  Vista View Park is in Davie (western Broward County), and the great thing about being on the road at 5am on a Sunday is that there's no traffic!  We got out there by about 5:25am and did what we needed to do to set up.  By "set up," I mean we found a place in the grassy section on the side of the trail where we'd leave our coolers & bags.

There was no lighting (other than near the bathrooms), and all runners were told this ahead of time in order to bring/wear headlamps or other gear.  I have a small light that clips onto my visor, but it doesn't throw off a ton of light, so I swung by Fleet Feet earlier in the week & picked up some Knuckle Lights.  (Thanks, Janet, for the Fleet Feet gift card!  It was how I purchased my new gear!)  These puppies are super light-weight and you just slip them on over your fingers.  There are three settings: high, low, and blinking.  I decided to wear my visor with the Amphipod light and bring just one of the two Knuckle Lights.  I was really glad I had the one Knuckle Light because it was dark in some sections.  After about an hour or so, I dropped it off at our spot & tossed it into my bag since the sun was starting to rise and there was no need for it any more.

From what I heard, there were about 45 relay teams and only about 40 individual racers.  Not a ton of people, but it was crowded at the start.  It took maybe 2 or 3 laps for people to start spreading out where you wouldn't have to dodge slower runners all the time.  The crazy thing is that for the loop being on 1.24 miles, I didn't see Hans or Morgan too often!  They both started out ahead of me, and I wasn't making an effort to try to keep up since I wanted to find my own groove and, truth be told, the combination of the darkness and the uneven ground (because, after all, it is a trail) made me a bit nervous.

Vista View Park is a former landfill.  When I saw Mike Melton today, he called it "Mount Trash-more."  Haha!  If you're familiar with most of South Florida, you know that it's flat.  Our "hills" are generally highway overpasses & on/off ramps!  I was a bit caught off-guard to realize that the race route would have sections that weren't flat!  There were 3-4 sections of some type of incline; one of them was a real doozy!  I made a deal with myself that if I could run everything for 20 miles, I'd let myself start to then walk up some of the inclines (especially the longest/steepest) of the bunch.  Not a big deal, and I did stick to that "rule."

Because this was not a road race, I had to get acclimated to the non-road terrain.  What started off as mulch (which was probably my favorite of all of the surfaces) would turn to a dirt/rock/grass combination.  There were areas where a concrete "gully" existed on the side of the trail (presumably for rain and to minimize the washout of the trails/paths).  While these gullies weren't as wide as a typical sidewalk, they were wide enough on which to run, so once I found my groove of when to run on the trail vs. when to run on the gully, things got much easier.  The problem was that other people had the same idea about using the gullies, so there would be times that I had to pop off of the gully, go around someone slower, and then come back to the gully.  Also, to a certain extent walking up the gully also made the worst of the inclines easier.  Of course, with that said, I hated seeing walkers in the gully when I was still in my "run up every incline" mode.  Whatever.  Oh, and there was also at least one guy who was running barefoot.  Yes, completely shoeless!  I cannot imagine what the bottoms of his feet looked like at the end of the race.  (Barefoot runners are just a strange bunch!)

A big part of a race like this is effectively managing nutrition & hydration; if you wait until you're hungry or thirsty, it's already too late.  Knowing that I didn't want to survive for 6 hours on simply energy gels, I tried as best I could to set up my coolers for easy "grab and go" types of stops.  At that start of the race, I tucked two Gu gels into my top so I wouldn't have to stop & pick them up.  This is standard MO for me; but there's only so much space to use!  (For SoMo, I might've tried to tuck 5 gels in; that was a bit much.)  I had my first Gu at about 50-55 minutes in and another about 50-55 minutes after that.  At this point, I'm almost 2 hours into the race and haven't really stopped yet for anything.  The really nice thing about such a short loop is that if you decide to not stop, you'd be back to your stuff in another 12-ish minutes and could grab what you needed then; it wasn't like you would be gone for another 30-45 minutes!

It wasn't much beyond 2 hours that I decided I really needed to start thinking about drinking something.  I forget exactly when it was, but I began swinging by my cooler every loop or every other loop in order to drink a few gulps of something and/or have a few bites of food.  I had opened all of the bottles that I brought and then resealed them just so I wouldn't have to worry about potentially sweaty hands being unable to grip twist-off tops.  If nothing else, it saved some time & energy too.  My go-to drinks at first were grapefruit juice, orange juice, and pickle juice (but, obviously, not during the same "visit" to the cooler).  It was only after all of those were gone did I go to PowerAde Zeros.  

There was an "aid station" or, more accurately, an "aid tent" that had a table of munchies & two coolers of things to drink.  I forget what the brand of the mix in one of the coolers was (Enduromaxx or something like that), but the best part was that it was cold!  Even though I still had drinks left in my own cooler, I started swinging by the aid station table for a small cup (or two) of this heavenly chilled goodness.

Despite the fact that I was not streaming music, I knew there would be no way my phone's battery would last for 6 hours.  My plan was to bring my portable charger fully charged and, when the time came, take my phone out of my armband, grab the charger, plug it in, and carry them for a while.  Was it a pain to have to carry the phone and the charger?  Sort of, but it wasn't terrible.  I forget how many loops I did carrying them both; perhaps it was 4 or maybe it was 5.  The goal was to get not fully charged, but at least enough to last me through the end of the race (which is how it worked out).  For shorter races, this (obviously) would not be an issue.  As SoMo showed me, my phone is capable of playing music that's not streamed and running RunKeeper for upwards of 4 hours.

One piece of advice kept ringing in my head: keep moving!  I might've looked odd pacing back and forth by my cooler when I would swing by for something to eat or drink, but I really think it helped!  Other than the few seconds that I would literally have to stop walking in order to grab whatever it was I wanted from the cooler, I always kept moving even if that meant walk 10 feet one way, take a big sip of something to drink, walk 10 feet the other way, take another sip, etc. 

As I told Dr. Dan on Monday, during the race, various things hurt, but then either something else started to hurt (so your mind was taken off of the first "problem") or you just forgot about it.  The good news is that nothing ever hurt too bad.  Yes, towards the end, my muscles (especially my quads) were sore.  Ok, let's be honest, they were very sore.  However, it truly was a "you've been making me work for nearly 6 hours" type of soreness and not a "something's injured" type of pain.  (Refer to #10 here: http://carilynjohnson.com/10-knew-ran-ultramarathon/.)

Cardio-wise, I felt really, really good!  Yes, that one particular incline for the 20 miles where I'd run up it did kick my behind and make my lungs burn, but the "reward" was when the top was reached because after a sizable flat stretch, there would be a decline that allowed you to gain some speed and still feel like you were recovering from the incline's torture.  Even though an ultra is all about endurance, it's not so much about cardio-type endurance as it is muscle-type endurance to just keep moving hour after hour after hour after hour.  I have no clue when this picture was taken, but it had to be somewhere around the 4-5 hour mark.  See, there's proof that I really was having fun!

Did it rain?  Yes.  Was it terrible?  Not really; it's just rain for crying out loud!  There were a few brief sprinkles during the race, but nothing more than a few minutes that actually felt nice hitting your face.  Toward the end, though, you could see the really dark clouds gathering, and you could feel the wind picking up.  It was just a matter of time before the rain started.  This was probably on my last lap (maybe halfway through it).  Was it terrible?  Well, knowing this would likely be my final lap and that I was already partway done, I dealt with it.  Am I glad rain like this didn't start early or last longer?  Abso-freakin-lutely!  Should I have attempted one more loop to see if I could get it done before the 6 hour cut-off?  Probably.  Did the rain give me a reason to not try one more loop?  Probably.

It was a really cool feeling to be knowing that I'd be crossing the "finish line."  (I have that in quotes because this was an area that I had passed over 26 times before.  It's not that you actually went somewhere special to "finish," you just decided that you were done!)  There was no photographer to get pictures of people as they wrapped up their last loops, but I know I crossed the timing mats for the last time and had a smile on my face.  Was I exhausted?  Completely!  Was I happy to stop?  Oh yeah!  Was I satisfied with how I did?  Absolutely!  About the only thing I had energy to do was to get some of that fabulous cool liquid from the aid station and to use voice text to let both Judy & Dave know that I was done!  In fact, to tell you how tired and out of it I was, I couldn't figure out how to stop my Garmin watch.  LOL!  Yes, I had to ask a stranger, "Do you know how to stop this?!"  (He did, in case you're wondering.)

Because this race is all about how many loops you complete, even though someone crossed the finish line before or after you doesn't mean that you did better or worse.  In fact, you really don't know how you did at all until the timing service wraps up their end of things!  Both Hans & Morgan had finished their last laps after me, but did that mean they did more laps than I did?  Well, turns out the answer was 'no.'  Hans did 27 laps like I did, and Morgan did 26 laps.  I stuck around because I was interested in seeing/hearing who won.  Turns out that I did...just not 1st or 2nd place!  Haha!  A full list of results can be found here, but the long & short of it is that I was the 3rd place female.  That's some crazy shit, huh?!  What did I win?  A cool $25!  That's less than half of my race entry, but I'm still over the moon!

So what did I learn from this event?  Without turning this post into an even longer one, I'll try to sum it up.  First off, I learned that setting your mind to only focus on the wonderfulness of the day & the race (ala Melanie & Suzanne) will keep you in a "happy place" no matter the time or distance involved.  Secondly, I learned (again) what fun it is to do a race with Hans & Morgan even if I'm not running with them much.  I learned that ultra runners are an interesting, fun, friendly bunch.  It's hard to explain how or why they're different from other runners, but they just are.  I also learned that there's no shame in walking; in an ultra, everyone's likely to walk at some point!  I learned that it's a shit-ton of hard work to get ready for an ultra, but if you put in the time, and you put in the miles, it's do-able!  Lastly, I learned that I've got more in me than I think.  Seriously!  Just about 2 months ago, the idea of me signing up for a 6 hour race had never crossed my mind (mainly because I didn't and couldn't think of myself as ever being capable of this).  All it took was an invitation from someone who did think I had it in me.  Too cool!