Home Field Advantage: Tilden 50K
I ran PCTR's inaugural Tilden 50K today. Today was the last PCTR 50K I have on my schedule for the next several months, and since there are obvious employment-based reasons that I might not live in the Bay Area next year, it might be my last for quite a while. Thus I really wanted to go all out and break five hours. I wasn't certain I'd be doing the race until this past week, since I just ran a 100-miler last weekend and a friend wanted me to go to the Grand Canyon with him, but once I signed up I was mentally ready to go all-out in my home park: Tilden. The course started at Lake Anza and repeated a 13-14K loop three times, then finished with a 9K lollipop-shaped out and back. The plan was to run the three loops in 1:20 each and the out and back in under an hour. I ran the loop in a practice run on Thursday and my time, as best I could tell, since I ran it with a slower friend and did all sorts of stops and starts on the watch, was 1:22. Under race conditions I thought I...