Return to California, Return to Running

 I'm writing this from my new home in Yucca Valley, California a few days after running Canyons 100K in Auburn. 

Whatyousay?

(Aside, why am I blogging? No one does that anymore. What's more, Google's Feedburner blog e-mail subscriptions are going away, so I'll have to port my subscribers to some other service like MailChimp.)

Anyway, yes, I'm back in California, I finally managed to buy a house here, and I ran my first race in a long time. I injured my hamstring January 2020, and it didn't fully heal until after my Hayduke hike in September. The only ultra I ran in 2020 was the virtual Potomac Heritage 50K in November, which took me over 9 hours. I started and finished at my house, and I had to call Gf from the far end and beg her to take a cab across town to hide some water and a flashlight for me so that I could actually finish. "I know you haven't been in a car in months, but this is my only ultra this whole year and I really don't want to DNF..." 

I did finish, but 2020 was clearly the least running and the least racing I've done in years. Possibly as far back as 2001-2003 in college when I started running and ran one marathon a year. So I'm not great running shape.

Return to California

As for California, Gf needed a distraction from everything on election day, so she applied for a job in the desert. They offered. She accepted. So in February we drove a box truck with two dogs and her belongings across the country on I-40. Thankfully we were a week prior to the deep freeze in Texas but it was still damn cold. 

We jogged over a pedestrian bridge over the Mississippi in Memphis

We stopped to (re)learn some history at Little Rock Central High School.

The coldest night was at Lake Thunderbird State Park outside Norman, OK. I believe that Arkansas and Oklahoma were the 47th and 48th states that I have visited. (I'm missing Rhode Island and North Dakota.)

We also stopped at the Oklahoma City bombing memorial.

Finally, when we got to New Mexico, things got wonderful. We got some locally grown beans and chile peppers in Mountainair, New Mexico and hiked around the Abó ruins.

Then we were back in California. We stayed in a friend's cabin in Crestline in the San Bernardino mountains while looking for a house in Yucca Valley.  We moved fast to buy a house and though we were quite frustrated with the lack of support or explanation of anything by our agent and our lender, we got the first house we bid on. The windows are really big, the dogs have a fenced space to play, and it's very close to the national park and a whole bunch of dirt trails. It's not furnished, because apparently nice furniture costs thousands of dollars and takes months to arrive, but you should get vaxxed and come visit.

Return to Running

Through all this, I managed to run every day this year. Sometimes it's just two miles a day, but even when I had to run loops around an interstate rest stop on the move across the country, I've done it every day. While in Crestline I was able to do several medium length runs on the PCT, such as running to Deep Creek Hot Springs and running partway up San Jacinto from Snow Creek. Once we were settled in Yucca Valley, I ran the California Riding and Hiking Trail traverse of Joshua Tree from my front door, making it almost 40 miles, and my longest run since December 2019. 

I've been thinking about getting the race schedule going again for a while, but races were (and are) still being cancelled, plus moving across the country complicated planning. Still, I was looking for Western States qualifiers so that I can enter the lottery for 2022, and Canyons 100K seemed like it might actually occur. I put my name on the waitlist, but was so far down I thought I might not get in. Plans for getting to the race (a solid 8 hour drive away) were sketchy, but it all came together. 

I got another Covid test, got my second vaccination shot, Gazelle came to visit the days before the race, and we drove up together. I shared a hotel room with a Berkeley runner friend, and we were off to the race(s) at 5AM the next morning from Overlook Park in Auburn.

I started with 10-minute miles, which wasn't difficult with a large descent to the river. The first 25 miles of the race was lower elevation and smaller climbs. Throughout the day each of the three Berkeley friends passed me as expected. M, then D, then Y. I tried not to get too excited about my pace early on, despite the easy math predicting a faster than expected finish. That is, it's pretty easy to run through the math as you knock off the miles--"OK, 10 miles in 2 hours, we're 1/6 through, that's a 12 hour finish. 12 miles we're 1/5 through... now we're 1/4 through..." Then 1/3, then 1/2, etc. and all of those predicted roughly 12 hour finishes. But I didn't take it too seriously because I knew that I would get worked in the second half, so I should really just focus on my 16 hour goal. 

 

 

Once we made it to Ruck-a-Chucky, we started real climbing. First up to Foresthill, then El Dorado canyon, and finally a climb to the finish at China Wall. I forgot my trekking poles at home, and could have really used them for those later climbs. We really lucked out with the weather, as it never got too hot. This helped keep my stomach in line, though as usual, I couldn't consume much other than soup broth by the end of the day. At least I kept it all down. 

I was slightly chattier than usual, actually getting to know another runner that I was passing back and forth all day. My watch goofed up towards the end, such that I thought I was much closer to the end than I was, and would easily break 16 hours without having to really push it. Finally I did reach the finish, in 16 hours...and five seconds. Close enough.

Onward

So that's it. Nothing major. I finished. It was my longest run since August 2019, and I'm glad to be back. DYK did some calculations, and of the 20 runners who ran both Castle Peak 100K (a harder course) in August 2019 and Canyons 100K in 2021, he was the only person to runner Castle Peak faster, and I had the second worst comparison performance (smallest positive time differential). Still! I finished.

I had a nice afternoon in Berkeley the next day before flying home. (Direct flights from Oakland to Palm Springs, get vaccinated and come visit dorks!)

 

I hope that I'm back for real. Covid rates are still as high as they were last summer at the second peak, but it seems like there's basically no outdoor transmission, so it seems safe enough to this vaccinated runner. 

I've got a rough one-a-month schedule penciled out:

May: Capital Backyard Last-Person-Standing, outside DC

June: Black Hills 100, Sturgis SD

July: Desolate Peaks or (less likely) Hardrock

August: Kodiak (50 or 100), Big Bear CA

September: Mogollon Monster, Pine AZ

October: Euchre Bar Massacre, maybe also Cuyamuca 100K

November/December: One of MMTR 50/Hellgate 100K. 

I guess we'll see.