So this happened.
There were A LOT more folks running the 50 miler and the 50k than I would have thought. Are there this many people a glutton for punishment? Apparently so.
I should have brought my real camera to try and capture the sunrise but crappy iPhone shots will have to do. Then again, I’m not sure ANY mechanical camera could recreate the experience for the being and the view of the naked human eye.
Moments before the start, the race director said we were swapping the order of the colored loops… which meant we’d be doing the ascent of the mesa at mile 5 instead of mile 15. This proved a blessing albeit mentally I was all out of whack on distances and routings.
To Vacation Races great credit, the course was exceedingly well marked. Even in the long, long, LONG stretches across fields on trails that would befuddle even the sagest of trackers, even here the course was well marked. There were only about three instances when I had complete panic that I was off course… and within 10 seconds I’d see another flag. It was easy to let the mind wander though it was dangerous as one could misstep and fall into the dirt… or plummet off the cliff side.
I took a lot of photos… albeit more of them in the opening 26.2 miles. The closing mileage of the 50k resulted in fatigue physical, mental, and photographic. But there’s still A LOT of photos I’m going to mass upload. Scroll by… it’s just a jaunt through Navajo Country.
