Yippee

I ran a personal best by 3 minutes for 14:49:38 in the Diablo 50-miler yesterday. I was hating life from mile 24-31 because, well, it felt like someone was applying a baseball bat to my groin with every step, so I was having nightmares of hernias, kidney stones, and testicular cancer. Then at mile 31 it magically went away and I was doing OK, but I was still kind of hoping I wouldn't make the 6:15 cutoff at the mile-38 aid station. Then my friend John Bellows came down the trail and met me a mile before the aid station and starting running to pace me. I thought he was trying to kill me. We got to the aid station and Marcus and my friends Dula and Susan Parkinson were there to cheer me on. I was a couple minutes over the cutoff, but I was doing fine, so they let me continue. We pretty much rocked the remaining 12 miles, and that was that.

Huge thanks to my pacer John, surprise support crew Dula and Susan, and Marcus for driving cars around so I could get home. Thanks to everybody that's paced me before. I'm totally grateful, but fair warning to anybody else that may help out in the future: we're now 2 of 3 for getting tickets on the way home from Diablo.

Also, I had a good time talking with a friend of a friend Catra that's going for the PCT speed record this year. She's starting May 23, so I asked if this was her last race. Nope, she's running Miwok 100K next week, some other 50-miler the week after that, and the Ohlone 50K plus 100 miles to the start line the week after that, three days before she starts the PCT, so it was cool to meet somebody as crazy as me that would just casually say "duh, you gotta get a run in" before your huge adventure. Her blog.

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