Half-Assed Runner

I had signed up for this race months ago.  It was held at Lake Maria State Park and was another trail race.  Lake Maria State Park is about 20 minutes north of my house and is a very quiet and pretty park.  It gets exceptionally pretty in the fall when the leaves change color.  This race falls on the same day as the Twin Cities Marathon and my wife runs/volunteers at that event every year.  This year though, she decided to forego the TC Marathon and so she and the Monkey joined me for this run.

On the way to the park, we saw a huge bird flying over us.  My wife told me it was a Snow Goose.  When I looked it up later, I found that is it was actually a Trumpeter Swan:

The Trumpeter Swan, Cygnus buccinator, is the largest native North American bird, if measured in terms of weight and length, and is (on average) the largest living waterfowl species on earth.

Trumpeter Swan

The day of the race was beautiful and clear, but very cold.  It was 44 degrees at 9 am.  Of course, I was running in shorts, so I was freezing.  Since the event was being held in a state park, there was an entry fee ($5).  I had driven up a couple of days earlier and scored a yearly pass ($25 for entrance to all Minnesota State Parks for 12 months).  Timberdash was offering the yearly passes for $20 on the day of the event.  I’m glad that I nabbed a pass prior to the day of the run as I did not want to wait in traffic to purchase a pass.  We were warned that parking would be limited, and even though we arrived about an hour before the 5K, the parking lots near the race area were already full.  The race volunteers guided us to parking on the side of the road and we actually ended up pretty close to the starting area.

This was a very well run event.  There were a few vendor kiosks set up, but also free coffee and some other small snacks.  There was also a campfire which turned out to be a great decision due to the cold temperature.  Check in was fast and friendly.  The only problem that we encountered was that they were out of safety pins.  Having run so many races this year, I had more than enough in my car for our bibs.

The Monkey was running the Kids’ 1K Fun Run.  They broke the kids up into age groups and the youngest children did laps in a small field.  There were kids as young as 3 years old running and they were a blast to watch.  The older kids ran a 1K portion of the same course that the 5K runners would follow.  My son was in that group.  He came in 3rd place in the race, only a few feet behind the 2nd place finisher.

Another nice thing about the race is that they watched/entertained the kids while the 5K was run.  While my wife and I were running, my son was drinking hot coco and sitting around the campfire.  He won a Minnesota Golden Gophers ball cap in the kids’ raffle.  There were also bananas and other snacks (including early season Halloween candy) available as well.  This made waiting for mom and dad to finish running very easy, even for my son.

I had jogged around the course a couple of days prior when I bought the park pass.  I ended up seeing most, but not all of the course…and not in order.  That’s due to my poor directional skills.  I did warn my wife that there was a huge hill at the end of the race.

The race director asked that “serious runners” line up first.  I don’t consider myself a serious runner, so I waited.  It sounded to me that they were going to have a wave start.  That’s a good idea, but could have been a problem since the trails were not very wide (about 6 to 8 feet) and the first 3/4 mile was also the final 3/4 mile of the race.  I guess that as long as the slowest runners/walkers were through that 3/4 portion before the “elites” reached it on the way back.

It turned out that I misunderstood the intention.  It would be a gun start for all racers (no chip timing) and the RD was just trying to position walkers in the back.  By the time I figured this out, we were only able to secure a spot near the very back of the pack.  The horn sounded and I was still futzing with my iPhone (I used Kinetic to track this run instead of my trusty Runmeter because Kinetic seems to handle GPS better in wooded areas).  By the time I actually started moving, I was one of a handful of folks in the very back of the pack.

I started passing people left and right.  This was very tricky due to: my proximity to the back of the pack, the number of slower runners/walkers, and the steep downhill portions of the initial run.  I was flying past runners (including my wife) by using the sides of the trail.

Eventually I hit a pocket of runners keeping a comfortable pace.  I would stay with them for most of the race.  The water stop came very quickly but was positioned so that runners would cross it twice (.75 miles in and .75 miles from the finish).

The terrain was gorgeous.  While the full on explosion of fall leaves was still a week or so away, the park was beautiful.  There were heavily wooded areas, lake views, open fields, plenty of hills, gravel, and – my nemesis – sand.  Even though I was keeping an incredibly slow pace (around 11 minutes/mile) I found the run challenging.  I ran the first 1.5 miles before taking my first walk break.  I have learned from my previous trail runs that there’s no shame in taking walk breaks.  My breaks were very short (10 – 20 seconds), but were more plentiful than I would have liked.  Still, I managed to stay with the same group of runners through most of the course.

I hit the water stop for the second time and grabbed some water.  I knew what lay ahead.  The last leg consisted of a big hill, followed by a small downhill and a small streth of flat terrain, and then finished with a monster hill.  I was during this portion of the run that I started picking off more and more runners.  When the monster hill finally appeared I was surprised to see EVERYONE ahead of me walking it.  It didn’t matter if they were at the top or bottom of the hill, they were all walking.  I planned to run as much as I could and then join them.  Another guy had been pacing off of me for the last .5 miles or so and we were the only ones running the hill.  He started walking about halfway up the hill and I was going to follow suit, but I noticed that the photographer was positioned about 3/4 up the hill.  There was no way I was going get photographed walking and panting, so I sucked it up and ran past the photog.  I started walking right after that.    I walked most of the rest of the way up the hill and regained running for the (incredibly short) remainder of the race.  I must have passed about 20 runners on that last hill and was going to pick off a couple more before the finish line, but their kids ran out from the spectators and joined them and I really didn’t feel like flying by them at that point.

I crossed the finish line and stopped Kinetic.  It recorded the distance as just short of 3 miles.  So much for the GPS accuracy.  One of the things that I don’t like about Kinetic is that you cannot change the distance.  Oh well, even with the correct distance, I managed to average 11:09/mile, by far my slowest race so far.

I found the monkey with his new hat sitting by the campfire playing video games.  We waited for my wife to cross the finish line.  She punched me because I guess that “monster hill” didn’t adequately prepare her for the final hill.

I really enjoyed the Timberdash.  The event was extremely well run.  The race shirts were awesome as were the finisher medals (first time I’ve received a finisher medal for a 5K).  I would love to run this race again next year if it’s not on the same date as the Twin Cities Marathon.

I am thankful that this is my last trail run of the year.  I only have two races left: a local 5K and the Monster Dash 10 Mile run (will be my longest race yet).