Laura, Emmett and Chuck at the Kenyon Devore Trailhead.
In June, I wrote about running the PV Marathon, and then getting up and running 26.2 miles AGAIN the next day. This was in preparation for the 50- mile/marathon double I am running in December. The second “practice” race to prepare is coming up in August – the Mt. Disappointment 50 miler. Even though I have completed 2-50 milers, I am not completely certain what the best kind of training is – only because it just takes a lot of time to recover after you’ve run 20 miles, much less 30 or 40. If I trained like you all do for a marathon (that is, running 80% of the distance), I would NEVER be running, but always recovering. So, basically, my training has been all about dealing with the time and heat factors.
With that in mind, I went on 2 training runs with Todd Fanady, Chuck Sohaskey and Laura Chaides to prepare. They had been doing segments of the trail on several consecutive Sundays, and I think I joined them for the two hottest ones. Each run started around noon, so we could suffer in the worst heat, and covered 15-22 miles (depending if you wanted to run extra loops of hard sections).
After a few Saturday morning training runs, you really appreciate why you do the run so early in the morning, but at the same time, since we KNOW we will be also running at 2pm, you might as well get used to it.
Laura, Emmett and Chuck at the Kenyon Devore Trailhead.
Unlike the Saturday training runs, there is very little opportunity for pit stops or refueling. Even in the race, there are sometimes 9 miles between aid stations, so you need to balance between being overhydrated and dehydrated. On the training runs, you have to guess whether you can get through a particular stretch with one liter of water.
Laura and Todd "running" out of the Tunnel.
My first training run started at Red Box (the turnoff to Mt. Wilson on Highway 2), and ran down to the Devore Trail. It’s a bit sunny, but downhill. When you reach the bottom, the 50 mile course splits off and does an 18- mile loop, and both the 50K and 50 miler finish uphill. It’s 5 miles, 2500’ of elevation gain. Rested, it took us 90 minutes! Then we still had 5 miles back DOWN to the car.
Pretty... difficult.
Our second run, the following Sunday, again started at Red Box, and we made our way through the 5.7 to 21.2 portion of the course – 5 miles of downhill, 10 miles of HELL and 3 miles of downhill.
Probably the hardest section is Mt. Josephine. Basically, it’s 2.5 miles, 1250’ of climbing, no shade. During the race, we will probably hit Josephine before 9am. But on the training run, it was about 2pm, and 90 degrees. The 2.5 miles took us an hour, and then another 3 hours to cover the 8 miles back to the car. I never felt so cruddy in my life. There was a section where I had to sit down and physically rest every 100 yards or so, which explains how it took me 3 hours to do 8 miles.
Think of us on August 11th, when I am doing the 50 miler, and Chuck, Laura and Todd are in the 50K. By the way, the race is still looking for volunteers. If you are interested, please talk to me and I will give you the information.
Todd Fanady looking for Volunteers.