Tussey Retrospective: Race Day and Post-Race

I'd better wrap this up before I completely forget what happened.


Race Day

First, the things I think went well on race day: 

• The temperature the morning of the race was in the 40s and it was breezy. The support vehicles had to leave the starting area before the runners so I opted to wear my jacket for the first few miles. I'm sure I would have survived a few minutes standing around in just my t-shirt, arm warmers, and shorts, but I was glad to have the extra layer for warmth. By the time we saw Steve around mile 3, I was warmed up and ready to get rid of the jacket.

• Speaking of Steve, he did a great job of telling us how far until the next time we'd see him. Having him tell us the degree of difficulty of the upcoming leg was also helpful. Even though I had looked at the course description a zillion times before the race, I could only remember a handful of the leg descriptions. I hung on to those little nuggets of information that he was feeding us like my life depended on it. Okay, that's a little dramatic but the info did help to frame my mindset for what was next.

• With the exception of a handful of potato chips, I stuck with what I had eaten during training (Gu gels, Gu Chomps, and bananas) and felt just fine. The nutrition plan I trained with provided me enough energy without ever feeling too full and bloated. My only concern was that I may not have absorbed enough of the water I was drinking since I peed  four times during Tussey. At Big Schloss I only needed to go once during the almost 10 hours so four times seemed like an awful lot. Fortunately, it wasn't hot the day of Tussey so I wasn't sweating tremendously. Had it been warmer, I would have been worried about dehydration. 

• Packing all my nutrition in an easy-to-access container also worked out really well. Usually, I just stuff a freezer bag with as much as I can which usually results in me dumping half the contents to get to what I want. The plastic container I brought was large enough to fit all my nutrition (and extras) and easy to open.

• I take after my mom and always pack plenty of snacks for road trips. I knew Steve would be on the course all day and wouldn't have a chance to go off and grab food if he got hungry so I packed him plenty of munchies and drinks. Peanut butter-filled pretzels, lunch meat, bread, Kashi bars, trail mix, V8, Pepsi, water, and the all important toilet paper. We also packed beer and Mike's Hard Lemonade but that was for post-race. :-)

A couple of things to improve:

• Better planning as to when I would need to refill my water and nutrition. My 11 hour and 18 minute finish included almost 40 minutes of not moving so I could definitely spend less time at the support vehicle. I decided to look back at previous events to see how much time I spent not moving:

o   Big Schloss: Total time = 9 hours 55 minutes; Non-moving time = 1 hour 2 minutes

o   Skyline Challenge: Total time =  8 hours 8 minutes; Non-moving time = 30 minutes

o   Capon Valley: Total time = 6 hours 50 minutes; Non moving time = approximately 24 minutes (I started my watch late for this one so my data is a little off)

Granted I stop and take in the views, snap some pictures, pull briars off of me when I fall, etc..., so there will always be some amount of non-moving time. I'll just have to make sure I don't overdo it.

• Try to train with any shirt I might wear during the event. Most of our training took place in the dead of summer when it was hot and humid so I usually had a sleeveless shirt on. I ran a few times with a short-sleeved shirt, but I failed to do a long run with any of these shirts while wearing my Nathan. For Tussey I ended up wearing a short-sleeved shirt I hadn't worn during training and discovered that it kept riding up my back. Not only was this annoying, but my back was chafed by the end of the day.

• Continue to keep the stuff in the support vehicle organized as much as possible. Toward the end of the day I thought the back of the Tahoe was starting to look as if someone lived in there. It was starting to get a bit cluttered with all of our gear combined with Steve's snacks and other stuff. I'm sure some of this is inevitable so I'll just have to try to make sure I put my crap back in my gear bag or where it belongs.

• Make sure the support crew knows where everything is located and how things work. Steve did an excellent job and was able to quickly figure out how to refill my hydration pack, but I probably should have taken the time to make sure he knew how to do this beforehand. I also assumed he knew how to use our camera and asked that he take pictures since I wasn't sure I'd ever do this event again. He took a ton of pictures, but unfortunately had the camera on the macro zoom setting so many of the pics he took ended up blurry.

Post-Race

After Big Schloss I attempted to run the Monday after and really struggled. Not wanting to repeat that disaster, I didn't run for an entire week after Tussey. My first run was the Saturday after and it was really slow on a flat trail. As much as my mind thought I could run sooner, it was good to have that break to recover.

My biggest post-race problem is falling asleep. You'd think that after being on my feet for 11+ hours I would have been dead asleep the minute my head hit the pillow. Instead, I was wide awake and probably only got 4-5 hours of sleep. After tossing for hours after Tussey, I drank a Mike's Hard Lemonade at 2 a.m. hoping that it would knock me out, but even that didn't help. I've had the same problem after the 50Ks and can't figure out what my problem is. Physically I'm tired, but it's almost as if I can't shut my mind off. When I do manage to doze off, I constantly wake myself up because I'm tripping over a rock or a tree root in my dreams. I'm not sure how to fix this so I'll have to do some research to find a remedy that won't leave me brain dead the next day.

Xenocryst

What's that? According to my quick Google search, it's "a crystal foreign to the igneous rock in which it occurs".

It's also the name of the latest hat pattern that I finished last night. I came across the pattern while I was thumbing through the Fall 2010 issue of Knitscene at Adirondack Yarns in Lake Placid this past summer. The pattern uses an Estonian cast on which I had never heard of, but fortunately the author provided a link to this video. The Estonian cast on is definitely more attractive than other methods I've used so it's a keeper. This simple pattern was easy to memorize so it was the perfect companion for a few glasses of wine and the latest movie from NetFlix.

I wanted to test drive Debbie Stoller's Bamboo Ewe yarn that I bought from JoAnn's a few months ago. The color is Twilight, a purple/blue color that reminds me of grape-flavored Nerds. The yarn is 55% bamboo, 45% wool. For less than $5 a skein, it was nicer to work with than I expected. It was fairly soft and didn't split like some of the cheaper yarns I've worked with (ahem, Naturally Caron Spa AND Country). It had a couple of knots  (including a section of yarn that seemed to be tied together by a 12" strand) but nothing so bad that I couldn't work it out.

Thanks to Ula for modeling. Yes I know she/it is creepy, but get over it.

Tussey Retrospective: Pre-Race

Now that I've had a couple of weeks to recover physically and mentally from Tussey, I thought I should put together a retrospective. "Why bother?" you might wonder. Well, let's just say that I might have to refer to this information at a future date. For today, I'll just focus on the pre-race lessons learned. 

First, the biggest factor: training. Overall, I think the training plan worked out pretty well. I was running five days a week. The entire training plan was 23 weeks long. (UGH - I just realized that's almost six months. No wonder I was ready to be done.) Two of the three weekday runs were between 5-8 miles, while the third weekday run ranged anywhere from 6-12 miles. Those mid-week 12-milers during the peak weeks were a bit cumbersome, but I think they helped with the mental "stick-to-it-ness" training. Saturday long runs included eight runs of 18 or more miles. Sunday runs ranged anywhere from 6-12 miles. Looking back at my log, I seem to have only missed 17 of the 115 scheduled runs during the 23 weeks which means I did 85% of the runs I was supposed to do. That's pretty darn good in my opinion.

The 50-mile training plans available online vary so much. Some have you running back-to-back long runs on the weekend (e.g., 20 miles on Saturday, 20 miles on Sunday). I think the thought behind this approach is that you train yourself to run long that second day to simulate the exhaustion you'll feel toward the latter part of the race. PHOOEY. Mandy and I both thought that that approach would SUCK since we'd basically be giving up most of our weekend. Instead of back-to-back long runs, we opted for the longer mid-week run. We did run three, back-to-back long runs over Labor Day weekend (25, 10, and 14 miles) to see how our legs felt after running a total of 50 miles over the span of a weekend. I personally didn't feel much more tired after Labor Day's run so I took that as a good sign.

After a few mishaps early in the training, I finally found a nutrition plan that worked and stuck with it. Basically, taking in a gel or 3-4 Gu Chomps every 30 minutes after the first hour of running. I think that works out to be somewhere in the range of 190-200 calories an hour. When it was convenient, I'd substitute a banana for a gel or Chomp to mix it up and just to eat real food. I decided to just drink water during the runs and skip the Gatorade. Before Saturday's run I'd also eat a bagel with peanut butter 1-2 hours before we actually started running. Post-run I'd either have Endurox or chocolate milk.

Other things I think I did right:      

• Buying a new pair of shoes about three weeks before the event and breaking them in over the course of 3-5 runs. My shoes felt bouncy, but broken in for Tussey.
• Not lifting at all the week before the event. For past events, I would just skip my leg workout the week before but this time, I decided to not lift at all. Not sure how much this helped physically, but I think it did help me sleep more since I wasn't worried about getting up to get to the gym. Which leads me to...
• Getting plenty of sleep the week before. I think I slept 8-10 hours the week leading up to Tussey.

As for things I could do better...

For Tussey, I probably could've gotten away with running fewer technical trails and instead run more hills (versus walking them). I did a couple hill workouts, but probably could have benefited from running more hills. Some of the hills at Tussey weren't so steep that they couldn't be run (remember the older gent who passed me?), but I didn't have the confidence to run more of them for fear that I'd bonk later on.