Sulphur Springs 50K Trail Race

Just completed my 3rd 50K Ultra of 2010. The day turned out to be rather warm and a few more lessons were learned.

The day started early , up at 2:30 am after 6 hours of unusually solid sleep. Sleeping well before a race is a bad Oman. I find that restless sleep usually leads to great results! It was breakfast , coffee , hot tub, get ready I a was off to the race at 4:15. Arrived about 6:15 , too late to see the 50 and 100 milers off. Chatted here and there with people I haven't seen in awhile and bumped into Run Mania folks , Nature Girl , Chainsawbaby,Doonst, b_squared, dgrant, casual-runner, AlfiefromPickering and Mid_packer. Biggest suprise of the day was seeing Ann Marie Burmeiste from Durham. This was a first her first trail race and a new distance! She completed the Run in 3hrs finishing 129th out of 184 competitors.

It was already starting to get warm when the race started at 07:30 am, around 18C. Stuck with Annie until her 2.5K turnaround. My objective was a 6 minute pace, crossed the 10K Matt in 56 minutes , a little fast but not too bad. With 10K behind I headed back out on the 20K Loop. I was feeling good, did my first Gel , was drinking plenty of Gator Aide and Water. At 20K I did 4 Eload Caps as a precaution , I repeated this at 30 and 40K too. I was running everything at a comfortable pace , keeping the avg near my 6:00 min/k goal. Finished the loop in 2hrs4min, that's 30K done in 3 hours...just as I planned! Last year the "20K loop" was closer to "18K" , 50Kers were reporting a distance around 46K in 2009. That certainly wasn't the case this year! The loop was allot closer to 20K , my Garmin said 19.6K. Heading back out for my 2nd 20K loop at 10:30 I was starting to over heat. I had a feeling that this was going to be a factor! A few Ks in I started to take walking breaks to cool down and recover my heart rate. I wasn't dehydrating as I was drinking a cup of Water , Head and Coke every aide stop plus I was drinking in between from my water bottle. I was really sweating , there was almost no breeze in the Forest and as the Sun got higher in the sky we were more exposed. Around 40K the walk breaks were becoming more frequent and I was logging 10min Ks! I couldn't even run the downhills without being totally drained and having to walk to recover. With 10K to go I was constantly squirting small amounts of water on my head. I was also getting cups of Ice at Aid stations and eating it straight up. The Ice , Water and walks helped me to come around and I was able to run the last 5K , 3K of it was downhill. Last 5Ks were 6:34, 6:03, 7:09, 7:32 ( Gulch) and 8:15 ( Gulch ).... much better then the previous 5K of 9:43, 9:01, 10:33, 7:53 and 10:57 ( Big Climb).

I finished in 5:45:09 , 35th out of 89 participants, 31st out of 53 males and 11th out of 15 in my AG.

I stuck around for an hour or so after I was done. Driving away the I the car registered 30C. I am sure that the last couple of hours I was running temps were in the mid to high 20's. The way things are going this year I better get use to running in the Heat. The next time I run in these sorts of conditions I am going to reevaluate my expectations and pick a new goal. Instead of a 6:00 pace a 6:30 pace would have been a more reasonable.