My Favorite Race of the Year...

...and I forgot to train.

Euchre Bar Massacre happened again. After heading out to California for Castle Peak in August, and doing reasonably well, my training dropped off in September. I did have two 60+ mile weeks, but mostly was down around 40 per week. I rode the 60-mile WABA 50-States Ride (where you ride a bit of every state-named avenue in the District). That was an interesting way to see the city, and I had fun doing it with the group, but as far as the biking itself goes, it's mostly terrible. I did some pretty lame scouting of the Tuscarora trail, as I was sort of thinking about setting an unsupported FKT on it in the future, but I didn't really enjoy this section all that much.  I also went out to West Virginia and did a 40-mile loop in Dolly Sods Wilderness for my birthday. I'll never get around to blogging about it, but I highly recommend the Sods if you're in the DC area--the northern section is a high plateau  with scrubby windblown trees that brought back memories of Alaska, sort of. The southern part is your regular West Virginia river canyons, but there are some decent views.

One night I looked at a topo map, and went to a spot in Rock Creek Park where I'd previously thought "OK, if you went off-trail downhill here, you might actually be able to get some vert." I did it two, maybe three times, getting no more than 125 feet each time, thought "this is dumb," and stopped. I can spend all day climbing, but 125 feet per repetition feels worthless. In Berkeley I could get more than 1,000 feet right off campus, and even more than that on Tam or Diablo. Those I can do repeats on, but not 100' climbs. I thought briefly about switching over to speed work for the fall marathon season, but that mostly didn't happen either.

So that's how trained up I was for Euchre Bar, and then I heard that the course had gotten harder. When I first did this race, I explained why I loved it so much saying, "you bushwhack up crazy steep climbs and then bomb down steep runnable trails." Since then, two trail descents were moved off-trail, and two more were removed this year. I still love it though.

I took the train to Sacramento and caught a ride with Caveman to the campground. Thirty seconds before the start, I realized I didn't have my hat. So I ran back over to my hammock and grabbed it. Then thirty seconds after the start I realized my maps had fallen out of my chest pocket while I was digging around for my hat, so I went back to grab them. Thankfully, Sean asked what I was doing and just handed me a set he had handy, so I didn't lose much time. The leaders all missed a turn, so they were behind me briefly anyway. Within a mile or so from the start, the course had changed. No more bombing down the Green Valley Trail, instead we went left, failed to go left far enough, started some rock slides that were pretty sketchy given how close this was to the start and how tightly clumped we all still were, and finally went left enough to descend in a gully instead of off a cliff.

Not left enough

Go further left

Looks like a lovely place to squat on public land

I traversed along the river to the gravesite for the first book, followed the old ditch, and climbed up to the Euchre Bar sign. Yu caught up to me after having lost his phone and spending 30 minutes finding it, meaning I could only keep up with him for a few minutes; once we started the next off-trail descent down Idiot's Gambit he was gone.

One climb done

Second descent to the usual bridge

The North Fork, possibly the North Fork of the North Fork

I got the book at the confluence of the North Fork and the North Fork of the North Fork (not a typo), and followed the trail to the big iron wheel. There were about 10 people, and we picked up the bag that the book was supposed to be in, but there was no book. We'd just seen Yu running the other way and he'd said "that book was an adventure!" but where had it gone? Finally somebody read the note in the bag: "crawl through the person-sized hole..."

So into the mineshaft we went.

Unlike some others, my group took the correct turn, and was reasonably able to peel apart pages of the wet book to take our page and go. We crossed the river again, scrambled off trail a bit, and began a climb on old mining trail that wasn't too hard to follow. I made my way to the next mineshaft and book pretty easily, but the book was just off trail a few hundred yards, and on the way back to the trail I saw Eric and Suzanna, stopped to try and explain where the book was, got confused, and didn't descend all the way back to the trail. After a half mile of awful traversing and occasionally thinking I was on the trail, I heard E & S go by below me. They were clearly on trail, so I dropped straight to them and we set off together.

Swimming holes to die for

Damn, was that only the second climb? This was not going my way. The third climb up Ebeneezer's was fine, having done it before. This year, we didn't even have to climb the rusty unsafe ladder onto the water tank. The ridge of 17,000,000 blowdowns was fine; I've never particularly had problems with it. Just stay to the left. I made it to the dropbags, three climbs done, with plenty of time for the first cut-off. I was happy that I ate a lot there--three donuts, a burrito, and lots of snacks. Eric dropped at the aid station, so I asked Suzanna if she wanted to go with me on the next leg, very much hoping she would. She seemed to have the same reaction, eagerly wanting company, too. So we started off, and immediately, immediately, took a wrong turn, traversing on some very well groomed trail or firebreak along the ridge, instead of taking the obvious descent down the Italian Bar trail. I tried to enjoy this, my one trail descent, but my pack was a bit heavy with all my nighttime clothing.

We crossed the river and began climb four, that was new this year: Sawtalian. JFC, this was hard. There are obvious cliffs to your right, so we went a little left, but eventually ran into two sections of cliff that we had to climb. Not worse than class 3, but still, vertical exposed climbing, and enough to give me some sewing-machine leg and set off some leg cramps that weren't particularly welcome when you're testing small rocks to see if they're secure enough in the dirt to hold your weight. We topped out into a grassy, burr-filled bench. I saw rock spires and cliffs at the top of the canyon to the left, and what looked like a more rounded way up straight ahead, so we bore straight/right. Then for the next three hours or so we backtracked and tracked and backtracked to try and find our way through endless brush. Like, Enchanted Gorge, Type 2.5 fun nightmare stuff, full on commando crawling under manzanita. We should have gone left.  We really should have gone left.

Can you tell how much fun I'm having?

A tiny percentage of the burrs

 We finally made it to the top, followed the road to the outhouse and our second to last book. We descended down Government Spring, on what I think was a decent line. I kept checking GPS to make sure not to miss the trail when we got down to where it (sort of) still exists; I'm not sure if that's a waste of time. We crossed the river and got our last book at the old cabin near the American River Trail. We slowly climbed out the Mumford Bar trail, wishing aloud that Sean would be waiting with the car at the campground at the top. When we topped out, Sean was sadly not there. I began trudging along the road, and Suzanna said she felt like running. Damn, that's impressive. She still had it in her to run at a time like this? And she wanted to run the road section at the top of Sawtalian too! How can you do anything but wallow in 2.5mph misery like me? (I mean, she did miss the next turn, so I had to yell for her to come back. So she didn't really gain on me, but still. Impressive.)

Finally, under a mile from the drop bags, I nearly made the same mistake I made two years ago. There's a difference in the old USGS and newer USFS maps, and I think the older USGS map has the road going through to the trailhead, while the updated, and correct one shows that it doesn't go through, and if you stay on the road, the route is quite circuitous. Luckily this year I realized the error and we bushwhacked our way to freedom, the aid station, our drop bags, and Sean's car. We were timed out after completing five hills. In previous years I completed six before timing out. I took my phone off airplane mode, and momentarily got a bit of reception. A text message came in. It was Sean, hours ago offering us a ride from the campsite. What a nice guy! Except for the whole putting Sawtalian in the race thing.

I went and got some sleep, and woke up in time for Caveman to come in to the finish. Back in March I thought this would be my year. I'd just broken three hours in a marathon and run a 65:41 10-miler. Then I realized that didn't turn over into trail running, and then it was 90 degrees and humid for five straight months. Oh well, I still had fun with friends in the woods.

Caveman's Finish