Tuesday, June 15, 2010

My First Trail Race

It was a beautiful weekend in Vancouver! Friday night was spent carbo-loaded on sushi before my first big trail race on Saturday at Simon Fraser University! OK-- I am not that hardcore and my race did not look like this picture at all. But it was still pretty difficult! I signed up for the enduro option- which was 9.7km. The race started downhill for the first 2.5km and then worked it's way back to the top... I thought  that the downhill part of the course would be a piece of cake... boy, was I wrong. It is WAY harder to run down a mountain trail then I thought. It was narrow, muddy and slippy... it was hard to see where to go when people were directly in front of you, even kind of scary. This was definitely the weakest aspect of my race. People were running down the trail with no fear and lots of people passed me during this part. I was actually looking forward to running UP the mountain, I contemplated dropping down to the 6km route because I was scared I was going to roll my ankle and ruin my summer! However, after the first 3km I started to get the hang of it and it became A LOT of fun! I am definitely hooked. I pretended I was in Twilight and a vampire was chasing me ;) I looked at the previous times from last year and the fastest time overall was 42 minutes... so I knew it would be a slow course. My original goal time was under 1 hour but once I started and realized how difficult it was I changed my tone and decided to aim for 1:10. I ended up finishing in 1:05:57 and could probably have taken off 2-3 minutes if I knew how to run downhill. The final km of the race was STRAIGHT up hill. Like-- at a 10 degree angle... I don't know how people could have run that, everyone around me was walking. I ran for maybe 10 meters just to push myself and to pass one girl... hehe. I felt a little nauseous by the end of the race but that passed as soon as I saw the fresh fruit! All in all, the race was a blast- Sunday's long run-not so much. The route was 16km and I wasn't as sore as I thought (or as hungover as I thought I'd be..) and averaged the route at about a 5:16/km pace. Legs were feeling pretty tight for the rest of the day and took Monday off from running even though I really felt like it... today I plan to do some sprints at UBC... let's see how this goes.  This is a pic from the non-trail part of the race...

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