50 miles...

Well, we just made it back from our last little roadtrip. We drove out to California where I ran a 50 mile footrace, visited some family and even stopped by Rifle on our way home.
The 50 mile race was a first for me. I have long had an interest in long distance running but never wanted to alot the time required to train for it. This year I decided was the time to try it and see if I actually liked it. Training for an ultra-marathon is not necessarily a difficult thing to do, it just requires a lot of time (ie. regularly spending 3-5 hours running trails letting the body slowly adapt to the stress of running for long periods). I found the challenge to be in finding the time between not willing to sacrifice the amount of time I spend climbing (8-10 hours a week), working 48 hour shifts at work at one of the busiest stations we have in the district (ie. we are regularly woken up 3-4 times a night to go on calls), and living the family life at home with a 2 year old and a now 2 month old. My training would often happen in the night and/or wee hours of the morning. I would try to run during the day as much as possible, but as my training progressed, and required more time out on the trails, I would start to run at night after the kids went to bed, or when one of them would wake up early sometimes, instead of putting him back to bed I would throw him the chariot stroller and go running while he dozed back off to sleep. Later I progressed towards running to work. Door to door distance is 37 miles for me to go to work. That's still a little far for me, so I would wake at 1:30 am, bike the first 15 miles to a park and ride, run the last 22 miles to the firehouse and then work 48 hours before running back home again. When race day finally came, I really wasn't sure what to expect, so I just ran. I felt awesome for the first 20 miles, but started to feel my PCL injury flare up by 30 miles (I had a 75% tear of my PCL in February that wasn't quite 100% yet). This injury flare up really started to slow me down a lot, leading to me hobbling the last 12 miles, barely able to run at all for the last 4 miles. I wanted to do the race in 9-10 hours, but ended up finishing in 11.5 hours. I had my mom meet me at the checkpoint/aid stations with extra gear, water and food. That was a very nice luxury. I was happy to have made it all the way, but am now looking forward to training some more, healing more fully and doing it again next year...
Other than that, it was fun to just be on the road with the little ones. Sky really loves it too. He doesn't have any trouble taking naps going to sleep, or playing no matter if we're at in a new house every night, camping or sleeping on the go while driving all night, which is really nice. We're just sure to make a stop every once in a while at a park along the way so Sky can run around and play, and then he is good to go :)
Until next time...
"This life, it ain't right for everybody, everybody would do it if it were easy. This life, it ain't right for everybody, but it sure has been good to me." -The Devil Makes Three

-Brendan