Hinson Lake 24 Hour Race Report Part 1–Am I ready?

I have been trying to decide how to go about this race report.  It is going to be a little difficult, because what am I going to say?  It is a 1.52 mile loop and I went around it 47 times.  I went around and around!  So I don’t want to do a play by-play, but I do have some thoughts from my laps I would want to talk about.  So I plan to do a little mixture of going throughout the day with a heavy dose of things I learned.

Let me start with a little pre-race coverage.  As we arrived in Rockingham North Carolina it reminded me of my first ultra in Laurel Mississippi.  There is nothing in either town!  It is certainly a small southern town in North Carolina.

My mindset for this race reminded me of a marathon I did in 2008.  It was the Greenville Marathon in South Carolina.  I had run 4 marathons going into Greenville.  Each one of them were horrible.  I knew what I should be able to do in a marathon, but I was not able to execute in any of them.  I knew a 3:40 marathon or below was at least what I could do.  But, I had tragedy happen in every marathon I ran.  In my first marathon I began to cramp at mile 12 or 13.  In my second marathon I had IT band problems and cramped again at about mile 16.  My third marathon, I cramped again and my fourth marathon I had more IT band problems.  Do you see a pattern!?

I wanted to run a solid marathon.  Just running the whole race would be a victory.  Not having a catastrophe would be even better!  I decided to run as conservative as I could.  I never regretted that decision because mentally I just needed to get over that hurdle. 

I went into this race with a similar mindset.  I have struggled for so many of these races I just wanted to run a conservative race, trying to get to the finish without major issues.  I needed to convince myself that I could do this.  In the back of my mind have been doubts because of all of the problems I have had.  I just needed to convince me, that the ultra is a race I could do and do it well.  As of Friday of last week, I was not convinced.

It is not that I did not have any confidence at all.  I was confident in everything that I had done to prepare myself, but somehow in the back of my mind I needed to prove something to myself.  My training, my nutrition and race plan I have supreme confidence in.  I just did not want anything crazy to happen and make my plan go south.  I knew one important thing when I woke up Saturday morning to race.  This race would be a run more with my head than my legs. 

My check list for Saturday morning:

- All my gear needed to be ready

- My nutrition plan was clear

- My race plan was clear

- I was ready mentally to run

I felt I was a go on all of the above.  We gathered about 5 minutes before the start for last-minute race announcements and we were ready to go.

My most recent ultra experiment in June was an epic failure so I was trying to put that behind me.  But, I was feeling a little pressure.  I would have a crew of 4 family members who would take their whole weekend just to help me.  I wanted to make it worth their time.  In my mind anything less than 60 miles would be a failure.  I tried not to communicate that, but I really felt at least 60 miles needed to happen.  If I could do 70 I would feel great, and 80 miles would find me jumping with joy. 

I thought my training prepared me well.  A theory that I use for my training is safe stress.  I want to put my body under a safe amount of stress during training so it is not shocked during the race.  This was the first time I felt I did that well. 

More to come….(Part 2–Forgetting about everyone else)

Happy running….