I'll post a full race report soon, but in the meantime, I'm recovering surprisingly well. As I bemoaned in previous blog posts, I was nowhere close to the shape I had hoped to be in when I toed the line on Saturday for Western States. The spring brought injury, that led to a racing schedule that left no time for training, and a work travel schedule that left no time for the Gorge hill training I had intended to tackle. I feared quad death, especially after a 25K 2 weeks prior followed by some hill repeats the next morning left my quads incredibly sore. My quads had been toast well before the half-way point at Miwok; I couldn't run for a week afterwards and didn't feel good running for 2 weeks. The calf injury-Miwok-Comrades-WS cycle left no time for a solid training block. It was race, recover, taper, race, repeat. A net downhill hundred was sure to bring pain and misery....
Good news--my quads survived, and survived shockingly well. I only started to feel them around mile 85, and I never got to the point where it hurt to run downhill. Now, 3 days later, I feel like I could run without much soreness. I'm not going to, as I plan to give myself a few more days of laziness and over-eating, but if I were chased, I could run, and do so without much hesitation. Some toenails have opted out, but other than a few blisters on the balls of my feet that are healing nicely, and a sore nose from a post-run car loading incident, I'm relatively unscathed.
I'm thrilled with F8 and 19:36 based on my training and also very happy to finish #2 in the Montrail Ultra Cup with a $2000 cash bonus. I'll post more on all of that later.
Good news--my quads survived, and survived shockingly well. I only started to feel them around mile 85, and I never got to the point where it hurt to run downhill. Now, 3 days later, I feel like I could run without much soreness. I'm not going to, as I plan to give myself a few more days of laziness and over-eating, but if I were chased, I could run, and do so without much hesitation. Some toenails have opted out, but other than a few blisters on the balls of my feet that are healing nicely, and a sore nose from a post-run car loading incident, I'm relatively unscathed.
I'm thrilled with F8 and 19:36 based on my training and also very happy to finish #2 in the Montrail Ultra Cup with a $2000 cash bonus. I'll post more on all of that later.
The top 4 Montrail Ultra Cup finishers: Meghan, me, Pam and Gretchen. Meghan is rubbing her belly and thinking of food. Pam is thinking about how she is going to crush me the next time we race. I'm more than a little bit scared of Pam, for good reason (I love you, Pam!). (Photo taken from Gretchen's blog ). |