#26 - Bear Mountain 50M

The course was absolutely unbelievable, both on the difficult/technical side and just plain beautiful, a work of art of some sort. Maybe a magician put this course together, an evil god forsaken mad man! I knew it was going to be tough but not this tough. JD has an excellent description of the trail here, so I won't bother to explain the details. The past two races I've done have been the toughest I've ever done by far. Bear Mtn is tougher than Cedro except for the altitude, or maybe its fresher in my mind. Either way these are the types of races that keep you coming back for more and provide you with invaluable experience. It was also a rewarding race, super tough and technical with enough ups/downs to keep you (or maybe not) off balance with a great organizational setup by North Face. 


The original plan was to start conservatively on the first 20M, which was mostly uphill, then cruise on the next 20M and speed up on the last 10M. For an estimated time of 9-9:30. Unfortunately I had ~10M of bad running and the real technical and nasty stuff started after the first 3rd of the race. I ended up with a time of 9:48.

I came up to 20M AS at 4hr, which was a bit slow (maybe 15min slower than planned) but generally on pace and feeling fine. Just after that I started feeling like crap, with some nausea and having cramps in both of my inner thighs. I was taking gels every 25min and salt stick pills every 50min, but it was very humid so maybe it was that. I took more salt pills, with gels every 20min and when I got the 27M AS I had some potatoes with salt, and around the 30M point I started feeling pretty good again, but by then I had lost some more time. And yes the trail was brutal but "sweet" at the same time. Not sure how to explain it. Not sure why Karl sent me an email the day before the race with a careful wording saying "enjoy those fixed rocks", they are not all fixed! and holy crap was I enjoying them.

At the 40M AS I was at around the 8hr mark, so no way I was hitting anywhere close to 9hrs, but nonetheless I wanted to give it a bit to see what I had. This part of the trail is the most technical and I took some chances and felt pretty good till the end. Tired yes but with a good feeling. I think this was the first race where I finished got some food and found a chair to sit around the finished line. I saw a bit of everything there and enjoyed every minute. It was good to see that everyone in our road trip finished and congratulations to Steve B, JD and Morgan.

In summary, two ways to look at the results: I was consistently slow (at least from an initial race plan point of view) or I was consistent throughout with a bit of a negative split at the end. I like the fact that I came out of the crappy period between mile 20-30. I felt very strong at periods but it wasn't a race I could say I ran and felt great. I had about 4-5 surges of energy with equal amounts of downs but the 10M stretch was grueling, trying to eat at that time was hard but I kept at it and it worked. Looking back I thought I was doing fine and all according to plan and the nausea/cramp came out of nowhere, really quick. I had +25 gels once I started to put them down faster and 15 caps of salt stick and about 4 small potatoes and 4 quarters of bananas. I think I'll be changing to gels every 20min and see how that works.