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The first 20 miles of the race went well, with my pace a little faster than I expected, partly due to the tail wind. For the next few miles the route went through streets that were flooded. The ankle deep cold water was not fun, but not much of a problem. However, the ankle deep quicksand was a problem, filling your [[Shoes]] with sharp stones and sand, and it slowed progress down to a crawl. The race director had said at the race briefing that it was okay to go around the flooding if we wanted to. It added a few blocks of extra distance, but that was well worth it for the time saved. At about mile 28 I found out we would have to turn around, which was bad news as the wind had been rising from 8 MPH at the start to 14 MPH with 21 MPH gusts by 9am. At the turn around on Bodie Island the wind was strong enough to make running difficult and my pace declined. 3.5 miles after the turn around we got back off Bodie Island and the wind was not so bad, but my pace never picked back up again. I finished in 17:41 as third male, fourth overall (provisional results).
=What worked=
* '''No [[Nausea|nausea]]'''. My last few races I've been plagued by severe nausea, so I'm happy that this did not occur again. I think that I avoided the nausea by drinking more. I drank about 2 gallons (8 liters) over the course of the race, which is far more than I was sweating out. I needed to urinate every 2-3 miles, which was annoying, but I wanted to err on the side of drinking more to see if this would fix the nausea issue. I had no concerns about [[Hyponatremia]] as I got a lot of salt from my drink.
* '''Fuel'''. I got a good number of calories from my [[Fellrnr%27s Go Juice| Go Juice]] (~4,500), and I experimented with drinking Ensure as well. In training I've been putting flax oil into my Go Juice, but this requires a blender so it was not practical during the race. The 6 bottles of ensure provided some extra fat as well as 1,500 calories. I also ate about a dozen [http://go.fellrnr.com/?id=35454X937677&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fdp%2FB004X8TK9W small soft cookies], which went down well and gave me an extra ~900 calories. Soft cookies are better than hard ones as they have a higher fat content and are also a lot quicker to eat. I probably ate too many at once, which was a mistake I won't repeat. I also had a couple of gels, so that's about 7,000 calories in total.
* '''Desitin'''. I was recommended [http://go.fellrnr.com/?id=35454X937677&xs=1&xcust=Destin&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDesitin-Maximum-Strength-Paste-4-Ounce%2Fdp%2FB003O32P8U Desitin] for preventing the dreaded 'monkey butt' when I put together my list of solutions to [[Fixing problems in Ultramarathons| common ultrarunning problems]]. This is the first 100 miler that I've tried this approach and I didn't have any problems at all, though this was not a hot, sweaty race.