First 50K race! What a hard and fun distance. You have to push hard the whole time but you know it will be over in a handful of hours.
Pre-Race
I came into the race with a little bit of an achilles niggle. I thought it was going to go away the Tuesday before the race, but it lingered during my few training runs that week. At some point, I was resigned to the fact that, well, my achilles was going to hurt during the race. How many Advils can you take at once? I popped in 3 delicious pills 30 minutes before the race.
My coach Will, who was also running the race, and I drove over together the morning of (3:45am wakeup!) and waited in the porta-potty line for our pre-race shits. I felt as ready as I was going to be.
Race Plan
Heading into the race, I was planning on sticking somewhat near Will. We’ve done three training runs together in the past few months and I felt that we were a pretty similar pace in general. I told him “I’m going to stay right behind you and draft for the first 25 miles, then I’ll pull ahead at the end” lol. I didn’t really have many splits in my head, aside from the fact that my coach told me that it took him 44 min to get up the first climb (~4 miles) and then there is a 5 mile descent where most of the top runners do 6:00-6:30 min miles. That is what I was planning to do. Outside of these first few splits, I didn’t know how hard/long I could push, as I’d never done a 50K before and never raced in those mountains.
Nutrition-wise, I had been consistently doing 3 gels an hour (100 cal Gu energy gels of a variety of flavors, caffeine amount and sodium amount) in training, so I planned to continue this. I also filled a 0.5L flask with Maurten 320 drink mix (320 cal) and one with Gatorade Endurance drink mix (~200 cal) and brought a baggie with another helping of the Gatorade mix. I would supplement extra fluids at the aid stations.
Race
Like I mentioned, the race starts on a 4 mile climb of about 2,000 feet. Nothing crazy, but certainly enough to get your breathing heavy right off the bat. For the few weeks leading up to the race, I hadn’t felt amazing on climbs and the start to this race was no different. Fortunately, this was the only time during the race that my HR monitor (Polar H10) was working (should’ve changed the batteries), so I could see I was pushing high 160s-170bpm for most of the climb. It felt hard and I was glad to get to the top a little behind Will.
The next descent is just awesome and great Western States training! It’s a beautiful grade and you can straight bomb it, which is what I did. The second mile down that hill was a 5:49min mile, just crushing it. Somewhere towards the last few miles of the descent though, I started to feel my quads show some signs of fatigue, so I backed off the last few miles to save myself for the rest of the race.
Activate the Glutes
It’s interesting, when I feel fatigue in a certain part of my body (say my quads), I am able to consciously “shift” the muscles which are working the hardest to another part of my body (ie. my glutes). I’m sure it’s not unique to me, but I think of it like a superpower. “ACTIVATING THE GLUTES”.
So I went into glute mode and that really shifted the fatigue away from the quads into a part of my body that is better suited to handle the work. I did the same thing during the 2022 Marine Corps marathon after my quads began to fatigue at mile 7 and I finished strong with a sub-3 marathon debut.
10 Mile Climb
The next climb was legit 10 miles. Heinous. But since it was so long and on fire road for the most part, the grades weren’t too bad and I found myself rounding the corner at the mile 9ish aid station and crushing some fast uphill miles feeling good. The next 10 miles were a mix of feeling strong, then all of a sudden not feeling strong and breathing heavy, then feeling strong again, and repeat. I potentially spotted a pattern that identified when I would have strong segments. It seemed that whenever I took a caffeinated gel, I would experience 10ish minutes of feeling really good. So I started to filter through my gels to find the ones that were caffeinated (which was like finding a needle in a haystack for some reason!). That’s when my GI issues started cropping up.
Stomach Issues
I typically have a strong stomach and I’ve been doing a really good job the last few months of training being able to take in 3 gels an hour during long runs. But I started to feel my stomach getting heavy and not wanting more gels around mile 10. A few gels later, I was taking my 6th gel right below the aid station at mile 16 (where I met Dr. and ultrarunning legend David Horton), as I was attempting to swallow it down, I had a gag reflex and almost expelled the gel back up. Luckily, it was just a reflex and I was able to swallow the gel, but it was clear that I wasn’t going to eat anything for a little longer until my stomach settled.
In retrospect, I think the issue was the intensity at which I was running. Thinking back to the Marine Corps Marathon, a similar thing happened. I took my last gel 2:20 into the race and instead of taking another at 2:40 (which was my plan), I skipped that one because I thought I might throw it up. At Terrapin, exactly at 2:20 into the race is when I barely got that 6th gel down. Something about that two and half hour spot and pushing really hard in a race make my stomach not able to handle the extra calories per hour. The next race I do, I will try just doing 2 gels an hour or trying some gels with a larger calorie content so I can eat less (like Spring Energy’s Awesome Sauce). I also want to try doing monitoring my salt intake more at the next race, as I had a super salty pack (from sweat) at the end of the race.
Getting Lost
For the next hour and a half, I kept pushing hard, knowing I was only about 5-7 minutes behind the leaders and thinking Will might have been hot on my heels (I had passed him on the descent). I didn’t have any food, but took in some fluids (probably not enough as my urine was pretty brown after the race lol). Right after the aid station around mile 22, there is a brutally steep (unrunnable, at least to me at that point in the race) climb for maybe a half mile. It was hands on knees panting the whole way up. Once I got to the top, I was barely thinking straight and took the first downhill I could find to the right. It was marked with the pink ribbon course markings, so I followed it. And followed it, for only 0.1 of a mile, when I came to an rocky outcropping with a beautiful lookout point. The view was great, but I didn’t come here for the view, I came to race. I looked down below the rocks and didn’t see another course marking. So, confused, I started going off course in the woods, bushwhacking, looking for the marking. After a few minutes, I started trying to climb down the rocky outcropping, but it was super steep and technical. There was no way the RD would send us this way. I tried to retrace my steps and after about 10 minutes, I finally came back to the spot where I had made a right turn and saw there was a fork in the trail, with pink ribbons in both directions. I realized all this panicking had gotten me all mixed up and I couldn’t even recognize which way I had come up and which way I hadn’t traversed yet. Frustrated, I eventually decided, screw it, I don’t know which way to go, I’ll wait on the rock at the trail fork and hope someone (ideally Will) comes to show me the right way. Eventually, after a total of 20 minutes (!), two runners came up the climb. I told them I was lost and they pulled out the map and mentioned something about an optional overlook. That was enough to steer me in the right direction. I took off down the steep descent, running in anger after having screwed up my race with a stupid navigational error (which was all my fault).
Finish
I had a little bit of a pity party for a mile or so after the last aid station mentioned I was in 4th, meaning Will must have passed me when I was searching for the right trail. Anyway, I got my act together, pushed decently hard, and finished in a respectable 5:00:56.
Both the race director Clark Zealand and Will had lots of questions when I came in, wondering how Will didn’t see me when he passed me! Will actually didn’t even realize he got third until he crossed the finish line. I told them the story and we all laughed it off. Maybe one day I’ll get my name on that overlook.
Takeaways
At the end of the day, despite losing 20 minutes to getting lost, I still ran a great race. I’m proud of the way I mentally handled pushing the pace hard. I remembered a while back listening to a podcast with Tyler Green, former 2nd place at Western States, where he mentioned that, during States, he tried to stay focused on the present moment during hard times instead of thinking about the finish or the past or the hurt. I channeled this energy during most of the race. Whenever I started to think about how hard this was and how I should start walking to make it hurt less, I thought about the present moment and how important it was that I keep racing hard. This strategy was super successful and one I hope to keep up in my future training, races, and in life.