A while back my running bud Rob and I decided two things: a)we were going to run a race every month, to encourage us to keep up the weekly running, and 2)we weren’t going to run any of the big, popular races, like Bay To Breakers or Wharf to Wharf, because there’s too many damn people at those things and the run becomes No Fun Whatsoever. You spend most of your time elbowing other people out of the way.
We’ve been doing various local events, like the HP Up and Running race. But then Rob, who is Mr. Gung-Ho Runner at the moment, discovered Pacific Coast Trail Runs. He did one in Pacifica that I felt completely unprepared for, since I barely exercised in July, and he said it was really hard but a lot of fun. So I signed up to do the Big Basin Redwoods run with him.
We did the 9km route.
I have never done a harder 5 miles in my life.
The total elevation rise was 980 feet: it felt like a couple of miles, straight up. At one point, as we slowly made our way up the hill, I was thinking, I just paid an organization to let me hike in a public forest. My shoes got dirty. I got dirty. I had to leap over bogs. We watched for tree roots on the path to avoid twisting an ankle. We serpentined down extreme inclines. This was no like run I’d ever been on.
Yesterday I took a nap—I don’t know when the last time I needed to take a nap for mileage under 10 was. I took a bath in epsom salts last night. This morning my quads are killing me.
I’ve signed up for the Mt. Diablo run. The 8km one—I’m not crazy.
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The one that really got me yesterday during the middle of my endurance run was: this is the route that the people doing the 50km route finish up on. After they’ve done 41 km, they do our loop up and around.
For those of you without a conversion calculator at home, 50 km is 31 miles. They had a total elevation rise of 5,925 feet over the same kind of terrain we had: not paved, with lots of irregular surfaces, tricky tree roots, and more bog than you could shake a stick at. In other words, they were doing more than a marathon over trail climbing over a mile vertically. And there’s no damn medal at the end, no throngs of people cheering. Those are dedicated runners.
Guess they’re really tired of the overpopulated runs.