The Pre-race Post for ET51k 2016

Cheating?

I'm past my longest mileage week and in less than 2 weeks I'll be standing in the desert at midnight waiting to run 51k. That's exciting!

My training has been a lot of time on feet on mountain trails with elevation alongside increasing road distance.  I've been hill and strength training but not speed training. It would have been easy to disregard roads during all of this but I would have regretted that.  I'm not the best at trail running and I think it's important to keep my distance and running in a good place.

The main purpose of the 50 is training for the 100. Having said that I still have goals.  Here they be:

C - finish the race within the 8hr cutoff

B - finish close to my last time 

A - run a PR (under 7:15)

A+ - under 7 hours

The first 13.1 miles of uphill is challenging, then the out and back from 20 miles to the finish can be deceptively long.  The sun rose over that portion when I ran in 2014 so it was staggeringly beautiful. That helped!  Getting past Rachel and not turning in to that alluring finish line at 20 miles is important. The entire course sits at elevation higher than Banff in the Rockies.  

The experience of this race is amazing, running through the desert at night with the full moon above you. Kev will be running his own race this year so I'll have to try not to drift off into traffic.  I'm happy he'll get the chance to see how the course feels at his own pace.

Most of all I think it's pretty cool that I get the chance to do this stuff.