Marathon Me

Kentucky was one of my last 6 states that I needed to finish the 50 States, and the schedule was fairly tricky for me to line up, but I wound up picking the Otter Creek Trail Marathon in Brandenburg the week after Sunmart. Jeff Linwood and Cheri Woldt would join Scott and I in Kentucky.

Due to logistics we were never able to meet up with Jeff and Cheri except on the course. The Saturday before the race we arrived in Louisville and went looking for lunch. This should have been easy, but we were equipment with Hertz NeverFound and managed to go to 5 different eateries that were either not open for lunch (2), out of business (2) or actually a post office (1). Thanks a lot NeverLost. We wound up randomly finding a wanna-be Chipotle that was very average, but a highlight was that the guy in line behind us was seven feet three inches tall! (The cashier asked, and no he doesn’t play basketball (which is apparently another question he gets asked all the time)).

Afterwards we headed to the Louisville Slugger museum and learned how baseball bats are made. It was kind of neat to see the big machines and how they used to do it with hand lathes. If Christopher was more into sports I would have totally gotten him a personal signature model baseball bat. (Man I wish I had one of those as a kid).

At this point Scott was feeling under the weather and so we headed to packet pick up. The race was unclear as to if there would even be a packet pickup and so we went to check it out and make sure we could find the start on Sunday, and there wasn’t a packet pickup on Saturday. So then we went looking for our hotel, which the NeverFound also had trouble locating. After checking in we relaxed for a while and then got ready for dinner. This should be easy right? Wrong. NeverFound tooks us to 4 places, some which didn’t exist (2), was allegedly in the middle of the river (1) and another which was in the middle of a field. After Googling a Chinese place we called and they gave us directions. Just for fun we asked NeverFound to locate the address, which it did, poorly. After being told the place was also in the middle of a field we just kept driving. We wound up finding a different Chinese place which we quickly pulled into not trusting any place in Kentucky to actually exist by the time you get there.

Scott continued to feel worse and worse as the night went on and caught some type of 24 hour flu. When we woke up he pulled himself from the race. Being a cheap bastard and assuming my foot was healed up enough from Sunmart, I gamely went on. Plus I didn’t want to have the replan the schedule to reinclude Kentucky!

The marathon was held in conjunction with an 8ish and 16ish mile race. There were 8ish mile loops around the park with some minorly hilly areas combined with a couple short steep climbs. The trail was beautiful, and very, very runnable. Running this race right after running Sunmart made me wonder why the hell I run so many road marathons.

All three races started at the same time with the marathoners doing a 1.5ish mile loop before getting onto the 8 mile laps. This was a HORRIBLE idea. This basically meant that for the entire first big loop you had to stop and walk and try to pass people. There were many people doing the 8 mile race that were having trouble walking in a straight line, and the single track was very tight and had lots of switchbacks, some of which went down a cliff. You had to be really careful about passing anyone. Luckily after the first lap it cleared up and you could actually run.

Scott waited for me to finish the first 1.5 mile loop to see how my foot was going to hold up and it was tender but I knew I could run on it so I kept going. I finished the first loop in about 7th-8th place and then started in on the slog. The second lap I was able to pick up the pace and was flying down the hills and powering up the up hills. I saw Jeff and Cheri at some point on this lap I think. Somewhere along the way I bumped into a tree and stopped my garmin, so that when I finished the second lap I thought I had done it in 50 minutes. Which using simple caveman math would have had me running sub six-minute miles, which, while I was going fast (probably 7:00/ish), I wasn’t going that fast.

I quickly became disillusioned and was sure the course was waaaaaaayyyyy short and that I would have to come back to Kentucky to run another thus throwing off my whole schedule for finishing the 50 states. I was totally bummed out and slowed down to 10/M pace thinking I might as well just enjoy a nice run in the park at this point.

After about 30-40 minutes someone came up behind me and I bitched about the short course and they told me I was an idiot and that it wasn’t short. Turns out he had a clock time of about 35 minutes longer than mine, so I wasn’t anywhere near a 50 minute 8.3 mile lap; my watch had stopped. Damnit! I immediately drop back down to 7:00 minute miles (much to his surprise as he thought for sure he was going to go all Nancy Dasso on me and leave me there gasping), and try to finish. This would teach me a valuable lesson about giving up. I always get on my son when he won’t try and here I was not trying in the race and it would come back to haunt me. After realizing the race would count and I wouldn’t have to come back to Kentucky I felt energized and really enjoyed the remainder of the last lap.

I caught a few more people and came out of the woods and crossed the finish line 4th overall. Now if you would have told me on Monday after getting my foot X-rayed that I’d get 4th place in this race I would have been super happy. But when I looked at the results I was pretty mad at myself for sandbagging it. I missed 3rd place by 70 seconds, 2nd place by 2:12 and winning by about 8 minutes. I don’t know if I would have caught the first place guy since he might have run faster if someone came closer but I would have easily taken 2nd. I figured I wasted conservatively 2.5 minutes a mile for 3-4 miles while being a totally sissy.

But I did get a free subscription to Trail Runner Magazine, some gumbo and Pepsi afterwards, a nice shirt, and ear-warmer running head band type thin and a really nice run, didn’t seriously re-injure my foot, as well as marking off state #45. And of course, got to tell my son “See what happens when you don’t try”.

All in all a good day. Unfortunately they are closing down the park due to lack of funds, so you can’t come out and do this race next year. But if they ever reopen the park and rerun this race, I would recommend it. I need to find some more trails in 2009.

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Tags: Marathons, Race Reports //