The weekend began with Jeff Hunt and I heading up to campbell river picking up a guy named buddy en route. We got to Bob Wall's house where we would spend the night and set up our tents and got out gear ready for the morning. I never thought I would get a good nights sleep the night before a race in a tent but I slept like a baby. 5am wake up time, quick breakfast and clean up and the four of us hit the road at 5:30. We arrive in Sayward around 6:20am to grab our race packages and got ready to roll. Looking up at the mountain was daunting enough let alone knowing that in less than an hour i would be grinding my way up it. The race began right at 7am and off we went down 2.5k of flat paved road, then we swung let to a slight incline (and i really mean slight) and thats when i knew my legs were toast. Since i've only been doing this ultra crap for a season now my base is slowly catching up but my recovery time from races is still lagging. That first small incline to the trail head just about killed me. Unfortunately, I had 5000 feet to climb in 6km still to go. I maybe made it up about 200m of the trail before i was reduced to walking and my quads, calfs and hamstrings were beat. My right foot went completely numb (as it did at Scorch Sole) but this time it was of more concern to me. Feeling crappy and literally beat, it was now a test of mental strength. Jeff Hunt caught up to me and we both laughed about how literally insane this race was. He looked strong but was hurting (but then again EVERYONE was hurting). Jeff looked at me and jokingly said "I'm never signing up for this again!". So we carried on up the Mountain and Jeff dropped me and I got picked up by Bob and company, I hitched on to them but my foot was bugging me even more. But we just kept going and going. We hit 3000 feet and i couldn't believe it. I figured we were getting close to the summit, but no, we were a mere 500 feet over half way. This is where the trail got extremely steep and I can remember holding on to a tree root, looking up and seeing bob about 50 feet in front of me (well basically over my head) and all i could see of him was his butt and his shoes. The incline of the trail was at least 50 to 60% maybe even steeper at parts. We finally hit the snow and lucky for my the trail flattened out enough to give my foot a rest and get some running in to make up some time. This whole running for 5 seconds was a bad idea. It just wasted energy that i should have used else where. Since I figured the trail had flattened out we must have been at the summit. Wrong again, This was probably the third time I thought i was at the top. We continued on the trail (which was called Bill's Trail, named after some sick and twisted minded dude from Sayward who built the trail) where it eventually got covered in snow. This is where the race got fun (finally!). It turned from a leg grinder into a sledding adventure. I of course didn't come prepared for this so i scratched my butt on the snow really badly. Finally we could actually see the summit and once we got to the top, Bob and I enjoyed the view and then began
the downhill trek home. Well when you think about how steep this mountain was going up, it was the same going down. Except they have ropes for you to hold on to going down on your butt if you sled (my butt was too sore already) so i just dug my heals in and fell countless amounts of time and it was soo funny. I dont know why i was laughing, probably out of frustration, but this was fun. Bob left me behind and after finally clearing the snow got onto some runnable trail where I met up with bob again. We got to the aid station on the Stow Creek Watershed and grab some watermelon, gatorade and some candies. Of both Bob and I had done races in the past couple of weeks so the downhill became the next taxing issue on our bodies. Both our quads were fried and the long, slow downhill was painful. I was thinking to my self "ok, scorched sole had 10k of downhill and it took me about 40 minutes to do including the stop at the aid station, this is 10k too so it should take us like 45 minutes". Again I was wrong. It took us an hour and 40 minutes to go ten k. The downhill, the hundreds of creek crossing and these humps on the trail (i wanna call them dried out stream beds) kill us. Theres an aid station at 5k and 3k to go and the trail in between those aid stations felt like it was 10k. We finally got back onto the road and made it for home. Both of us were in agony and just wanted to finish the run. We finish in 3 hours 33 minutes and 23 seconds.lessons learned:
1. Dont run an ultra a month before this race haha
2. Where some longer shorts or compression shorts so I dont get butt burn
3. Figure out whats going on with my foot, it probably has to do with my tight muscles
4. This race was the toughest I've ever done, physically and mentally, but once I backed off and realized I wasnt going to win, it was very enjoyable stopping to check out the views.
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