Weeks have passed since my first ever ultra marathon - a 50k mountain race held at Northburn Station in Cromwell. To sum things up: I came. I ran. I took 10 hours to reach the finish line. Wooo!
During the pre-race meeting we were warned about spaniard, an angry cow, and hypothermia/hyperthermia/hyponatremia/hypotension. We were also given instructions for what to do when an urge to use the bathroom strikes - find a large rock to duck behind. Yeah... No facilities for 30 miles. That was going to be interesting.
We started running the first loop around the vineyard in the dark. I did a fair job of not tripping and I climbed the first of five or so locked gates pretty well.
It took four hours of walking/running to get to the top of the big climb. At points, it was so steep that people used the fence to brace themselves!
Some people thought I was nuts for thinking 50k in the mountains sounded like fun. I treated it like a day of fast tramping - I took in the sights and had lots of snack breaks. :) The views up there were great!
I didn't expect the temps to reach 80 degrees... running 30 miles with no tree cover was quite challenging. I stayed hydrated with water, Powerade and my secret weapon - Coca Cola. I kept the food side of things simple - muesli bars, pretzels and my other secret weapon - crystalized ginger.
There was come pretty strange landscape that felt like running on mounds of desiccated moss. The rest of the route undulated.... just when you thought you weren't going to run uphill again, you were running uphill again.
This woman, in the pic below, and I played leapfrog for 49 kilometers. She blazed past me in the last kilometer!
I was feeling really good when I hit the marathon mark (26 miles/42 k), but then the wheels started falling off a little.
I was having trouble spotting markers on the course (I can't see red on brown/green very well - thank you colorblindness genes) and I couldn't fix the hot spots on the bottoms of my feet (I lost one half of my favorite pair of socks to run in and did not discover this fact until the day before the race). A really friendly spectator walked with me for the last kilometer. When she suggested I run the last few hundred yards to the finish line, I just looked at her pathetically and said I couldn't be bothered. Ha!
I vowed to never do another race like this again, since I didn't balance thesis, job, and training very well (binge training by doing four hour runs on the weekends isn't ideal!). But... now I'm thinking the Dunedin marathon (in September) would be a nice tune up race for some more ultras next year. We'll just have to wait and see!
