50 Miles and Black Toes

Sitting on the couch one night a few months ago I said to my wife "I need something to train for to get me moving."  This is a problem I have.  I am not a big fan of training without a purpose.  So I tend to sign up for trail races, marathons, climbing competitions just to keep myself motivated.  This time I deliberately bit off more than I knew I could do.  Why not push the limits a little right?  So I signed up to run the Ouachita Trail 50 miler.  I know this would be a challenge since the longest race I had run so marathon.  And this was one of the harder 50 mile races around here, since it went up and over Pinnacle Mountain at the beginning, and then around Lake Maumelle on pretty rocky terrain.  But, I knew I had the option to take the 50K turn around and turn it into an easy 30 miler, instead of the 50.  Of course that would still be longer than anything else I had ever run.  So with only six weeks to train I had committed myself to the big race.  Unlike previous races I have run, I really went into this training phase with hardly any planning and fairly low motivation.  My only goal was to finish one of the races, whichever distance I could manage.  Just to make matters more interesting, I was also trying to complete a series of section hikes to complete the 223 mile Ouachita Trail which runs from Little Rock into Oklahoma.  In the end, this hiking proved to be the key to my race training. I started the race with several friends from the Pikes Peak training runs and the Hash House Harriers. I stayed at my own pace with fairly low expectations and soon found myself running with my friend Ronnie.  He had completed the race a few times, and had run the 100 mile Arkansas Traveler that year. We ran together for a few miles before reaching the 50K turn around.  Ronnie had easily convinced me that I could keep going, so I did just that.  I followed my old friend Elaine's advice; "Run until it gets too hard, and then walk until gets too easy.  Repeat." Before I new it I had arrived at mile 25 and the turn around point.  I stopped and sat down for a moment, pulled a beer out of my drop bag, and proceeded to fuel up. It was really tempting to stay there, but I didn't.  I headed back down the trail and offered words of encouragement to all the runners behind me, even though it looked like many of them had no chance of finishing. On a 50 mile trail people get pretty spaced out, so I spent a fair amount of time alone in the woods. I listened to music, drank straight from a creek, and really just enjoyed being out for the day. When it got hard, I would take it easy.  When I felt better I would run some more.  Before I new it the end was in site and I saw a group of friends cheering me to the finish. I beat my planned time by more than an hour and fun while I was doing it.  Maybe next year I will train a little more.