2019 Tideland 24

How to Sabotage Your Race

With an additional two months of training, I wanted another race, preferably warm weather, to check my progress toward my goals for Dawn to Dusk to Dawn 50K and North Coast 24. While I would have liked a good trail run, I haven't done the hill training to meet that challenge, so I looked for another fixed time race. I had several to choose from, but one seemed more suited to more elite runners and others entailed higher travel expenses without the likelihood of being able to combine it with a nice vacation. Tideland 24 was just within my acceptable driving range and on the type of course I prefer, a 1.38 mile loop on groomed trails. The weather wasn't the greatest by my standards, a trifle too cold, but nothing extraordinary. I expected to push through about 16-18 hours of running and walking. With a 1.37779 mile certified loop, 14:30 pace is almost exactly 20:00 per lap. Initially I wanted to run sub-20:00 laps (14:30 pace) for as long as I could hold that, then continue walking until I hopefully reached 18 hours. I was hoping the physical layout of the course would fit itself to suitable breakpoints for walking. I think that's my current limit and didn't want to push myself to exhaustion attempting 24 hours, then face an eight hour drive home.

Aside from getting on the road 10-15 minutes earlier than planned, the drive seemed to be an omen of what was to come. To begin my mind must have been elsewhere because I started north toward the PA Turnpike instead of south toward I-95. That lost me my early start. Exiting the tunnel through Baltimore it became stop and go traffic with a 5 mile backup due to an accident. That added a bit of time to the trip. With stops for gas and food, by the time I arrive at packet pick up I'd been on the road more than 9.5 hours, much more than the 8 hours or so I'd anticipated based on google maps. Then finding my hotel proved to be a challenge also as the street sign wasn't illuminated and google maps neglected to tell me the route number going only by name. I was tired and frustrated by the time I got to bed. Race day morning began the same way. I turned the wrong way leaving the hotel and drove a couple miles out of the way.

Race day morning was cold! I think it was about 29F. I almost wore warm up pants over my tights. I decided not to and that was one of the few things that went right for me. A couple laps of the 1.38 mile loop and my jacket came off. It would be a couple more laps before I doffed ear warmer and gloves. It also took that long to begin to pick out landmarks I could use for my walk breaks. My Garmin proved useless for monitoring pace as it kept indicating I was running 15 minute miles when my lap times indicated I was close to 14 minutes. I was okay, not feeling great, but not yet struggling for the first 12 laps, roughly 16.5 miles. My legs started feeling tired then, much earlier than they had at Crooked Road, so I extended my walk breaks and cut back my running. My laps times slowed accordingly and I was able to hold that for 9 more laps which brought me to about 29 miles. At that point it became almost all walking. I estimated I reached 50K about 30 minutes slower than at Crooked Road. It had helped some that I was running and walking with two women, Cheryl and Tracie, whom I had met at Crooked Road who were moving at about the same pace. I lost contact when I took a bathroom break and walked a few laps by myself. Darkness had arrived, but even with my headlamp the going was a little daunting. I think I could use a brighter headlamp because I had difficulty seeing the trail when it curved. I would have been hesitant to run at any speed and there was no way I could have seen any obstacles like tree roots. I was getting a little unsteady on my feet with an occasional stumble as well. As the night went on and I got more tired, I could envision me stumbling, tripping, or otherwise losing my balance and pitching off one of the bridges with no railings and into the swamp.

I finished my 27th lap for 37.1979 miles with a time of 10:17:02 and at that point talked myself out of continuing in the dark. I was tired, a little light-headed, possibly from not eating the right balance of foods, a little scared of losing my balance or stumbling on a bridge, daunted by the dark because I didn't have enough illumination to be comfortable, and otherwise dug up excuses to stop. It didn't help that I lost some training time 3 weeks before the race, then tried to make up some of that with a couple good workouts two weeks before when I should have been tapering. As a result my legs weren't as fresh as they should have been Anyway, I informed the timer, thanked the race director and the volunteers, and headed back to my hotel.

After a good night's sleep and no repeat of the fainting after Crooked Road, and a good breakfast at the hotel, I checked out early (my reservation was through Sunday night), and drove home. I'm no more sore than after a long, hard training run, so I obviously could have pushed harder. I let the events of the drive down set the negative tone and never worked through that with positive thoughts.

The one issue I need to address is the feeling of light-headedness and being wobbly on my feet, since this isn't the first time I've felt like that. Some of it I'm sure is simply lacking endurance with a dearth of long runs, and I'm fairly positive most of the rest of it is what I'm eating and drinking, or not eating and drinking. I think it's the balance rather than the amount, and I need to adjust the ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. The one difference I noticed between here and Crooked Road where I ran very well was that I drank Coke at Crooked Road, which provided a sugar boost, and none at Tideland.

In some ways it's good that my next scheduled race is a 50K, since most of my issues don't develop until beyond that distance. That gives me more time to work on what's needed for North Coast 24 in September. Running 8 hours or more as a solo training run is still more than I can discipline myself to do, so I may add another 12 or 24 hour race or two to my schedule before that to help work out solutions, but they would be treated as training runs for testing possible solutions.