Ruth Anderson 50K/50M/100K -- sorta my first DNF.

This past Saturday was Ruth Anderson 50K/50M/100K, a classic and old school San Francisco ultramarathon now run by Rajeev.  RA has a very unique format.  You can choose your distance on the course, but you must complete the distance you are on or DNF (Did Not Finish) the entire race.  So once you hit 50K, you must declare yourself a finisher (and take your result in the 50K) or a participant in the next distance.  Once you decide to continue, you must get to 50M or DNF.  At 50M, you have another chance to declare yourself a finisher or you can decide to be an entrant in the 100K.  If you stop between 50M and 100K, you DNF.  I was coming off a much better than expected result at the American River 50 Mile Endurance Run two weeks prior.  RA was a relatively flat, loop course around Lake Merced, so it seemed the perfect time and place to make my first attempt at 100K.  I still think so, even in light of recent events described here.

RA is loop event, kinda like New Years One Day.  At NYOD, you had six, twelve, or twenty-four hours to complete as many laps at Crissy Field as possible.  The laps are barely over a mile, and at the end of your time you are credited with the sum of the distance of the number of laps you completed.  RA is also laps.  The RA laps are almost four and a half miles each around Lake Merced, bordering San Francisco State University and around Harding Park Golf Course.  Unlike NYOD, at RA you must cover a prescribed distance.  The only cutoff is eleven hours to complete fifty miles, if you wish to attempt 100K.  Rajeev is a charming and funny dude who puts on a good race.  He loves being around his people, and ultrarunners are his people.

Jill and I stayed at Elisa's (one l Elisa, not two l Ellisa from the previous post) apartment Friday night, and I stayed up to watch the fireworks at AT&T Park after the Giants game from Elisa's couch.  Elisa was away in Asilomar near Monterrey at a symphony retreat.  Jill and I woke up at 4:45AM, made final race preparations, and drove the three or so miles from Elisa's apartment to Lake Merced.  We could have walked or run it, but there was plenty of that to come that morning and afternoon.  Jill was attempting 50M for her first time.  I was gunning for 100K.  We got good parking, picked up and pinned our bibs, and set out in the not-so-cold to mingle with the ultra crowd -- always a good time.  Rajeev led us away from the parking lot at about 6:10 to walk to the official Start and give final instructions, particularly about the course and format.  He was charming as could be and made a few introductions of noteworthy participants -- folks that had run a long time ago or a connection to the race.  At 6:30, off we went.

Jill and I started off with a couple of Quicksilver runners, including Jim, Lisa, and Chihping.  Jim has run over a hundred ultras and ended up doing 100K.  Lisa is super cool and was chatting it up with Jill. Chihping has a skill that I want.  He can run and take pictures at the same time.  My goal was to finish under ten hours, since a single-digit finishing time obviously looks so much cooler on the Internet and would be sure to impress Elisa.  Elisa was already impressed that I got up and started the race, even though she does these things herself.  She appreciates the effort required to do these things, and considers the total effort if one spends time training hard.  So she did not need the ten hours.  Nonetheless, lately I must admit using impressing her as motivation on the course -- not necessarily to finish but to be fast.  This is not called hella foot vanity for nothing.  Anyway, I wanted to finish under ten hours, and that meant keeping my pace between nine and ten minute miles.  That was based on rounding 100K to sixty miles at ten minutes each for ten hours.  For survival's sake, it had to be over nine minutes.  (I actually did the math just now.  100K in ten hours is 9:36 pace, so I needed to be a lot more aggressive than I thought.  As we will soon see, it did not matter much, but it is funny to me that I was not more careful about calculating my pace.  Rounding 100K to sixty miles was off by :24 per mile for ten hours.  That is a lot and could have really made it tough to catch up, especially since I had not figured this out yet at what should have been the halfway point.  Hopefully another lesson learned, but I should keep the story going.)

As far as pace and effort, I was cruising for almost a marathon.  The loop format can be mind-numbing, and the urban scenery was not all that great -- even with the golf course, lake, and my alma mater (SFSU MA 2008).  Pavement sucks to run on, but there was a dirt shoulder most of the time that I usually stayed on.  There were a lot of distractions.  Other runners and bikes and strollers.  Cars on the road adjacent to the path.  Boats and rowing teams on the lake.  And the friggin gun range.  A lot of distractions, which is usually no worse than a not-bad thing when running an ultra.  If you are thinking about choking the guy who keeps getting in your way with his stroller or the nerve-rattling shotgun fire, you are not thinking about how bored you are or how bad your quads hurt.  This is a good thing, as long as you remember to fuel and hydrate.

Perhaps the most critical difference between a lap/loop course and an actual course in a park is the car.  On a course, somewhere after the halfway point, I realize that I am running to my car.  All I have to do is get back to the car.  I say it to people I pass along the way.  All we have to do is get back to the car.  Then I can be done and mess with my cell phone.  It is the best motivator.  This works against me and everybody else (in a similar manner, perhaps not the car and iPhone, but something like it) in a loop format event.  You pass the car way, way too often.  And everytime, you pass its temptations, like quitting.  I decided to wait until I had a marathon split to post before stopping at my chair (where Jill and I had stored our comfort bags near the Finish) to update Facebook with a live race status.  Another stupid motivator, but seriously whatever works for you do it.  So that was mine right then.

With about a half lap left to go for that marathon split closest to the chair, my knee started acting up.  It was not a nagging pain slowly getting worse, but a sharp pain to my outer left knee that was happening more and more frequently.  And unlike a nagging pain, it seemed like it could snap, crackle, or pop at some point if I continued to bound off of it.  I hoped it was an anomaly at first, then tried to walk it off, and pretty quickly realized that my race was over.  I was lucky that I was close to, but before, the 50K cutoff.  Had this happened a couple of laps later, I would have been committed to 50M.  I could have finished, but that would have been a lot of walking -- for a long time.  Maybe the 50M result would have been better for the Quicksilver team.  But I walked the last lap to 50K having my meltdown (like when I blew up trying to qualify for Boston at Surf City in February) and tapped out.  100K fail.  Just like Surf City's BQ failure, I was beating the heck out of myself emotionally.  I was hella bummed and disappointed and pissed.  I took my phone with me on that last lap -- the lap from the marathon split to the 50K finish -- and expressed my disappointment on Facebook via race status update (limping badly and about to quit).  Feedback there and texts direct from Hector and Marne, and Kate's responses to my texts to her, helped me rally.

By the time I was in my chair pouting in the Sun after my 50K tap, Joe reminded me via Facebook that I had a teammate and bff still on the course trying to finish her fist fifty-miler.  That threw me into crew mode and salvaged the rest of my day.  By the time I saw Jill, she was down to her final three or four laps.  The leaderboard for 50M was pretty bare.  She definitely had a shot to place overall and win the women's race.  I got her some Advil, did not mention the leaderboard, and cheered her along her final few passes through the Finish.  I kept peeps posted on Facebook, and she friggin won the darn thing and was fifth overall.

I had a few hours to wait for Jill, plus Jill and I waited around a while to root others (especially Quicksilver folks) to their goals.  The ultra crowd is one of the coolest.  I call them badass sweethearts, and that is exactly who they are.  Always nice, but tough as nails.  You cannot surround yourself with better people.  Sure, there are jerks in every crowd, but they are almost impossible to find in this one.  At the end of the day, Jean was second in the 100K, Jill won the 50M, and Amy won the 50K.  Go QSURT!  My 100K DNF hurt the team, but hopefully my crappy, injured 50K time will somehow help.  I got to chat with Chikara Omine -- one of my many ultra heroes who was out to root for his friends, particularly his New Balance Excelsior teammates.  He is running the Quicksilver 50M, so I will see him again soon.  (I love that in this sport we can regularly compete along side the elites and pros.)  I spent a lot of time with Kat (also from Quicksilver) and a guy I met on the course, Gavin.  Me and Tony (Endorphin Dude) had a nice chat.  He PRd his 50K by like two hours.  I think he finished in around six and a half and is currently on his way to run the Great Wall Marathon.  I spent a little with Jean, Marco (QS), and Rajeev.  I got razzed for quitting by Jim (who had big bloody wounds on his elbow from a fall and had run Lake Sonoma the weekend before), and a lot of encouragement from others.  It was a bright sunny day.  It was cold, but not too cold and not too windy.  It was pretty fantastic.  The whole day was, in spite of the result of my race.

I realized that this sport is hard.  If you never experience personal failure in ultrarunning, you are taking it far too easy on yourself.  And if you are taking it that easy on yourself, you are not doing ultras properly -- pushing yourself to and past your limits.  I realized that a lot of the people out there had experienced it maybe dozens of times, and that I was being a big baby.  I threw my handheld at a fence on that last lap.  Cute.  Endurance sports mean enduring these failures too and responding like a badass sweetheart.  Maybe rest more.  Maybe train differently.  Quit pouting for sure.  Quicksilver 50M is coming up on my birthday (5/11).  It is going to be hard -- much more difficult than American River 50M.  I cannot friggin wait.  Bring on the dirt!