It could’ve been muddier. I suppose it could’ve been more like that mudslide in “Romancing the Stone.”
To be honest, though, it wasn’t as bad as I imagined it might be. Oh, sure, a few (shoe)sole sucking moments amidst the mud, and a few soul sucking moments when the incline never seemed to end. And perhaps worst of all was my Garmin distance was WAY off. I was struggling with my pace but part of that was due to my distance calculated being a full 2 miles UNDER the actual checkpoints (which I only realized at about the halfway point when my watch said I’d gone 11.5 miles).
Having said all that, I must say it was the best marked course for a trail run I’ve ever done. There were ribbons demarcating the trail direction at just the right distances so you always felt like you knew you were doing the right way. I’m pretty sure at every trail race prior to this I’ve gotten lost or turned around; none worse than that time at Stinson Beach. For that race, which, yes, started on a beach but then sent us richocheting around a switchback laced mountain, I got so lost and was so very much alone in the woods that I cried out, “Help! Help!” and no one heard me. I cried a lot that day. But after those moments of tears, I trudged back in some semblance of the direction I thought I needed to go and eventually found myself back on the trail. No such problems today, thankfully. No smoke monsters or polar bears or hatches either.
That said, the course did present more than a few, um, challenges. Not just with cold mud puddles that I plopped my sneaker into only to have the icy chilled mud seep into my socks and worm it’s way to my core. To be fair, the mud was perhaps better than the ice puddles friends and family back East are soon to face with this Knickerbocker-esque Blizzard of 2016. But still, not a pleasant feeling.
No, the added challenges included the obvious tree root obstacles inherent in a trail run, the eerie Hound of the Baskervilles style fog layers, poison oak, and the occasional fallen tree blocking the path and requiring a bit of poor man’s parkour maneuvering. I moved with all the grace of a tasered frat boy drunk on beer.
Below is a photo of the marked course… which took us through a fallen tree.
Still, somehow I wound up with a 4:17-ish finish time and because of the small field of competitors, I wound up with 3rd in my age group. Oddly (at least odd for me), there were more runners signed up for the 50K than the marathon.
The nice thing about rain though is that it very often leads to things like this, which I saw on my drive home:
As this was near the garlic capital of the world (Gilroy, CA), we can only assume that at the end of this rainbow there was not a pot of gold but a pot of garlic.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to find out as the damn thing kept moving — leprechauns. They’re a slippery bunch.
