San Juan Trail 50k

Saturday April 7th, I ran the San Juan Trail 50k. This was my first race since I broke my toe the first part of January '07. A good piece of advice is when your toe is hurting for a couple of days and you aren't sure how bad the damage is, don't go for an 8 mile run on rocky trails. A few miles into the run after stepping on a rock I could now confirm that my toe was broken since I seemed to be in denial up until that point. The doubt was gone and so was any running for the next two months. When I finally started running again (March 3rd) I stayed on the pavement for a while until I was confident I could make it back to the trails safely.



The San Juan Trail 50k website said the course was "tough" but I was not expecting what I ran into the last 10 miles. Since I was two months behind on running I gave my wife Cindy an estimate of 6 hours before she left for a morning of shopping in Orange County to prepare for our 12 guests coming for Easter brunch the next day. The first 20 miles were fairly straight forward, we ran down about 1100 feet through beautiful scenery and nice single track trails, and we had been informed by the RD Baz Hawley (A classy and enthusiastic gentleman) we would be coming back up on the same trail, again...challenging yet straight forward. I must have been to entranced in trying to get my IPOD working during the part where he talked about the last part of the race. After making it back to the top where we had started the day the trail broke off into a new section. Starting about mile 21, after climbing the never ending road higher and higher into the misty abyss in the sky (it was really about 2 miles) I joked with the guys at the aide station that the hill was a piece of cake and did they have anything more challenging. I don't think they understood the sarcasm in my voice since they went on to tell me about how I was in "luck" and I would soon be faced with a climb even more challenging.

Picture by Charlie Nickell from his blog

After what seemed like a crawl I made it up the last climb and was rewarded with the last two miles of steep downhill running. Not exactly a reward when your quads are sore and tight. As I was nearing the finish I took a look at my watch and mustered up enough strength to go from a medium shuffle to a slow trot (aka, I picked up my pace oh so very slightly). I have not seen the official results but according to my watch I made it under 6 hours by a mere 4 seconds.... I was just a little off my estimate. :-) Postscript: Here is the results page I am pleased to say my estimate was really only 3 seconds off.