Race Report for Running from an Angel 50 miler:
4.5 hour drive to Lake Mead/Boulder City Friday afternoon. Dropped Emily, Charlotte, and Savannah (Jeff’s daughter) off at Hacienda Hotel and Casino ($33/night, nasty buffet, cigarette smoke everywhere). Jeff and I drive majority of course just before sunset. Wow! Nothing flat. Lots of hills. ”I told you” Jeff says to Ben. I’m now thinking there is less than 2-3% chance we’ll be anywhere near 8 hours. 8 1/2 if things go really well. We pack our 19 and 31 mile food bags with chocolate milk, Kerns juice, pb&honey, pretzels, etc.
Leave hotel 5:30am. Race starts at 6. 37 degrees at start line. Emily drops us off right at start. Still dark. Small group of 38 runners. No music. No microphones. No fires. No lights. Very little talking.
Someone says ready, set, go. The race starts. Jeff fakes something in his shoe or cramp or whatever and I cross the start line a second before him. Will I ever learn.
The first two miles Jeff tries drawing fellow runners into conversation to no avail. ”This isn’t a very friendly group” he says out loud. We run behind a girl for about a mile we figure we’ll easily beat. The only other time we saw her again was 2 miles ahead of us at the turn around (4th overall, 2nd woman). At mile 3 we hear the first conversations of the morning as two other women come up behind us and pass, chatting away. We learn one of them has run badwater before and is planning to run sub 8 hours today. Last time we saw her (3rd overall, 1st woman). The other woman lags behind and runs with us off and on for the next 3-5 miles. She’s 52 years old. Two years ago, the year she turned 50 she ran 50 ultras (43 50 milers, 7 100 milers). ”They tested me. They don’t know how I do it.” ”I have no recovery” are some quotes I remember. ”Who’s they” I asked. She was pretty amazing.
Another guy that joins us early on is Scott Kunz. I recognize Scott from a couple of marathons a few years ago. Scott ends up running the rest of the race with Jeff and I. He’s 29 and has completed 95 races of marathon distance or longer. He’s done the Wasach 100 more than once and has run the angel 50 miler we were doing along with the sister race, run with the devil (same course but in August) a couple of times. And the ultimate evidence of his experience was the fact that he crossed the start line even after Jeff. So when we all finished together…. you know what happens. It was fun to get to know him and gave Jeff and I someone else to talk to.
Other than talking to Scott, Jeff spent most of the first half of the race scolding me for going too fast. We traded places with runners in 9-12 place throughout the first half and had fun strategizing how we were going to accomplish one of our goals to finish in the top 10.
By mile 20 we had followed our plan pretty well, running 8:30-9min/mile pace when we ran and power walking up the steeper hills. We were doing good on nutrition (300 cal/hr) High was in the low 50s so no problem with heat.
At mile 23 we see an older man with sunken cheeks and the craziest gait you’ve ever seen coming the other way. Ask Jeff or I to show you how it looked. I can’t describe it in words. We congratulated him as he passed and never saw him again. He finished in just under 7 hours. We tried to count and time where the next 10 people were at the turn around. We must have lost track of one of them. We thought we were in 11th and 12th place at the turn around but were within a mile of the 5 or 6 in front of us. Only one guy passed us on the way back, about mile 33. We passed about six people, including two at about mile 40 and two more at mile 48. I think we were both amazed that we were able to keep our pace very constant the entire second half, including the last 10 miles of unknown territory.
Our support van was awesome, especially during the last 10 miles, leap frogging us and cheering us on every mile.
In the last half mile we found out Scott’s PR at this race was 8:05 so we managed to pick up our pace enough and “sprint” the last 200 yards in order to come in below that. A big bowl of hot greasy delicious chili was waiting for us at the finish line. Now where do we sign up for the 100 miler.
Ben L.