Zion Ultras 50K

 Way back in November, the gang started making plans to do the Zion Ultras in Utah.  We had people at the 100K, 50K, and half-marathon distances.  We made all the travel plans and started training.  At the time, it seemed so far off; when the weekend finally arrived, it seemed almost unreal.

The five of us who were signed up for the 50K, Nate, Tim, Myung, Mikki, and I, lined up at the start on Sunday morning.  Karri had finished the 100K in the night with Carrie pacing her the last twenty miles, and Amber, Theresa, and Josh were set to do the half-marathon an hour after us.  With Amber, Theresa, and Josh cheering us on, we took off:

The first six miles were on dirt roads that we'd done a shakeout on a couple of days prior.  Myung, Mikki, and I pretty much stuck together during this portion, and we were feeling pretty good.  After the first aid station, we headed into Gooseberry Mesa still together.  Here the terrain became very rocky and technical, which I tend to be more cautious on, so I fell back a bit.

The trail was marked by white dots and pink flags, and sometimes it was hard to tell where you were going.  For example, at one point, I saw a pink flag on a rock and took it to mean that you were supposed to go around the base of the rock, but when I started doing so, there was no trail there.  Someone told me I was supposed to go OVER the rock. Okay then! The following things happened in no particular order:

1) I started up a hill that was an out-and-back and crossed paths, first, with a woman who was breathing quickly, almost like she was hyperventilating.  Someone asked her if she was okay, and she said yes.  Then I crossed paths with Myung, who said something like, "It's scary up there, Molly."  It was, in fact, very high with a steep drop.  A lot of people were stopping to take pictures, but I didn't even want to mess with my phone, so I headed back down.

2) At a couple of points, I had to use my hands to help myself over rocks, and at one point my knees were down on a rock, too.  I had debated the "shorts vs. capris" question the night before, and I was glad that I had chosen capris so that my bare knees weren't down on the rock.

3) I came upon a permanent trail marker that said something like, "Difficulty level: Extreme," and a guy running near me said something like, "As opposed to what we've been doing already, which has been a walk in the park?"

4) A couple running together asked me what mileage I had on my watch.  I said 13.8.  They said they had the same, and asked if I'd seen an aid station; they said there was supposed to be one at (I think) 12.7.  Then I ran into another girl who said that she was pretty sure there wasn't another aid station until mile 17-point-something.  It turned out it was somewhere between 14 and 15.  I used the port-a-potty, filled my water bottles, grabbed part of a turkey sandwich, and headed back out.

I continued on Gooseberry Mesa and had thoughts like, "Is the whole race going to be like this?," and "Holy crap, how long am I going to be out here?" The terrain made for slow moving.  Then I hit another aid station that took you back out to the dirt road. There, I could finally get moving at a decent pace, and I started picking people off again (A LOT of people passed me on the mesa). I wondered how far ahead Myung and Mikki were.  There was a crossroads where you turned left, and that's where Josh, Theresa, Amber, Karri, and everyone (those who had done other distances or were there to pace or watch) were cheering.  Amber ran out to me with a bag of food and asked what I needed.  I said I was good and took the left turn.  I continued to pick people off and started crossing paths on an out-and-back with people who were heading to the finish, including Nate.

I headed into Grafton Mesa.  At the aid station there, a volunteer told me that I would do a 5-point-something-mile-loop, come back, and then head back on the dirt toward the finish.  On the loop, I crossed paths with Mikki, who was somehow behind me now (she later said I had passed her at the aid station going in and hadn't seen her).  Also on the loop, things got technical again.  I had to use my hands a couple more times to pull myself up.  Also, at one point, some sort of spiky plant got caught on my capris, I cried out, and the dude behind me pulled whatever it was out for me.  There was a HUGE hill at one point, and I said aloud, "You have got to be kidding me."  Whatever mileage the volunteer had said it was, my watch had it at more than that, and as my water dwindled, I started thinking things like, "How much further?" and "I want to be done with this."

Finally I made it back to the aid station. I caught a glimpse of Myung just leaving, but I badly needed to fill my water bottles, so I didn't try to catch up to her.  I headed back out to the road and started on the final dirt stretch to the finish.  The course took us again past the crossroads where you had turned to go towards Grafton Mesa, and where you headed towards the finish.  The gang was still there cheering and going crazy, which gave me a boost.  Also, there was a dude in a grim reaper costume stopping anyone who still had to go to Grafton Mesa; they had missed the cutoff and would be "reaped" from the course.  But for those of us who just had to go to the finish, he high fived us, so that was something, being high fived by the grim reaper.  I headed toward the finish.  Amber and Karri were there to cheer and take pictures.  Myung had finished about five minutes ahead of me, and Mikki finished about five minutes after, so we were all really close despite having separated.  We all took some group pictures and headed back to the Air B&B.

So, it was by far the most challenging course I've ever done and probably ever will do.  Though time goals went out the window pretty early on due to the terrain, and though there were times I was cursing the heavens, I, as a whole, felt good-- no injuries, no feelings of nausea, etc. Two days later, I am back in Omaha, still tired and sore, but as a whole feeling pretty good.  Though I at one point thought to myself, "a half-marathon would have been plenty on this terrain," I'm glad I did it.  As always, shout out to the awesome running crew from Omaha, who also kicked ass at their goals over the weekend. We have the best group ever.

thoughts on the Mean Girls movie musical

 So I've been out of high school for more than twenty-five years at this point, and sometimes I will watch a teen movie or show and think, "Were kids in high school that mean?  I don't remember them being that mean."  Then this person or that will come up in conversation and I will find myself saying, "No one was nice to them.  I know I definitely wasn't," or I'll think back to a time when a bunch of us got really carried away talking about someone behind their back and I'll realize, "I didn't even dislike that person.  I just let myself get caught up in it."  So the point is, no, high school kids are maybe not as overtly mean as they are on something like Glee or Cobra Kai, but I think the social dynamics are such that it sometimes seems better to join in, even on mean behavior, rather than be the one on the outside.

In Mean Girls, both the original 2004 version and the 2024 musical version, newcomer Cady Herron, who has been homeschooled and lived in Kenya prior to the beginning of the movie, learns that it's not only nearly impossible to stay above or outside of the high school social hierarchy, but that it's pretty fun to be at the top-- but that getting there isn't pretty, and your position there is always tenuous.  Almost immediately after starting at her first American high school, she catches the attention of both the outsiders, Janis and Damien, and the Plastics, the "cool girl" clique, led by the beautiful, rich, and mean Regina George.  At first, she doesn't see what's so bad about the Plastics, but then when she catches Regina kissing Aaron Samuels, her crush and Regina's ex, she agrees to Janis's plan to get revenge on Regina, who also wronged Janis in middle school.  Though she succeeds, she loses sight of who she is and hurts a lot of people in the process.

The original Mean Girls was iconic, with Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, and Lizzy Caplan turning in memorable performances as Cady, Regina, Plastics Gretchen and Karen, and Janis, respectively.  Though they were a tough act to follow, it wasn't long into the movie that I thought to myself, "This actually makes a lot of sense as a musical."  The original movie had some funny, over the top elements that the musical format gets to play up, and the songs let you see into the heads of not only the main characters of Cady, Regina, and Janis, but secondary characters such as Gretchen and Karen.  Karen (played here by Avantika) gets a hilarious song about how fun it is to dress sexy on Halloween.  This version also incorporates contemporary social media effectively; the way teens communicate is different now than it was in 2004, so it's neat that they work that in.  The only real problem I see with this version is that while the actors playing Regina and Janis (Renee Rapp and Auli'i Cravalho) are GREAT, Cady (Angourie Rice) is just GOOD, meaning Regina and Janis really steal the show.   I'm not sure if that's even a problem; I just found myself thinking that I would have liked to see 2004 Linday Lohan in a musical version, since we know she can sing and did a great job with the character.  Regardless...it's fun.  If you like musicals, go see it.

thoughts on the Barbie movie (some spoilers)

 

My mom, last weekend on the phone when I mentioned that I had plans to see the Barbie movie: You know, I still have an old Barbie in my hope chest.

Me: You used to let me play with some of your old Barbies.

Her: I let you play with all of them, except her.  I didn't want her sitting in a mud hole in the yard with the rest of the Barbies and GI Joes.

Me: Oh, yeah.  We used to make a swimming pool for them.  And then you would wash them in the sink.  We probably called that "going in the hot tub."

Her: Yep.  They got the full experience.

I open with this story because one of my favorite parts of the lead-up to the Barbie movie has been reminiscing about Barbies, which I played with with varying degrees of regularity from the time I was three until I was about eleven.  Some common things that have come up include that MANY of my friends my age also had Great Shape Barbie (my favorite), who wore a unitard and cool rainbow legwarmers (though I'm pretty sure I lost the legwarmers nearly immediately); it was pretty normal to give your Barbies other names, like Joanne and Shelley, in my case; most everyone had far fewer Kens; and we liked it when we had a Barbie that looked different in some way, like had a different hair color, which was less common in the 1980s than I imagine it is now.

One of my other favorite parts of the lead-up to the Barbie movie is that there has been a lead-up.  I used to go to the movies all the time pre-pandemic; since the pandemic, I have been probably fewer than ten times, and when I fell asleep during House of Gucci whenever that came out, I remember thinking to myself, "Maybe I just don't like going to the movies anymore."  It's been fun to look forward to going to the movies again.  Today, when my friends and I were walking down the hall to the theater, one said, "Just follow the pink!" The theater was packed; probably 98% of the people there were women and girls, and probably 90% of those women and girls were wearing at least some pink.  It's fun to have a movie feel like an event that you get your friends together for and even plan what you're going to wear.

I'm not sure if I have anything profound to say about the movie that hasn't been said already, and I won't give a full plot summary since that's also been covered elsewhere. Instead, here are just some random things I liked, in no particular order:

1) Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who is the way she is because she was played with too hard; they show a little girl cutting her hair and drawing on her face with a marker.  Yes.  I did not do anything like that on purpose, but inevitably, weird stuff just happened.  For example, the aforementioned Great Shape Barbie that I liked so much?  Well, you know how Barbies had a little ball on the top of their neck that held their head on and made it so that their heads moved?  Okay, well, that ball broke off of Great Shape Barbie at some point, after which I had to just shove her head down on her neck, meaning she basically had no visible neck and was shorter than all the other Barbies.  I had another one whose leg was constantly coming off and often just got played with with a missing leg.  The point is: Weird Barbie was a great idea.  I'm sure everyone had at least one Weird Barbie, whether they wanted one or not.

2) Where do I even start with Ryan Gosling as Ken? So, his storyline is that in Barbieland, his job is Beach (not surfer, not lifeguard, just Beach), and he spends most of his time trying to get Barbie's (Margot Robbie's) attention; Barbie seems to like him okay but doesn't take that much of an interest in him.  I read an article that said that on average, girls had one Ken for every seven Barbies they owned, and that you may have had a Ken but probably didn't ask for one, which-- yeah.  One of my three Kens was a hand-me-down from my mom, and my grandma gave me the other two.  It's pretty funny that the movie works that dynamic in.  After accompanying Barbie to the Real World, Ken learns about the patriarchy.  He likes the part where people respect him just because he's a guy, but doesn't like that "you have to have all these things like 'medical degrees' and 'swimming lessons'."  (I don't know if I'm getting that line right verbatim, but Gosling's delivery is SO FUNNY-- I don't think he actually does air quotes, but they are definitely there in his voice).  So he goes back to Barbieland and sets up a ridiculous version of the patriarchy.  At one point, all of the Kens sing "Push" by Matchbox Twenty.  There's a war that devolves into a choreographed dance number.  I said afterwards, "I feel like Ryan Gosling has been training his whole life to play this part."  He was great.

3) Though I laughed a lot during this movie, I also got teary-eyed a couple of times. The first was during America Ferrerra's speech about all the contradictions inherent in being a woman that everyone has been quoting, and which she delivers even better than I imagined.  The second is when Barbie decides she wants to be human and live in the Real World, and Barbie's creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) takes her hand.  Barbie sees flashes of moments of joy from real women's lives, where women are doing things like playing with kids and graduating, but also, for example, getting a strike in bowling and being cheered on by her friends.  I don't feel like I can adequately describe how or why it is so moving, but it is.

4) The movie is really well-paced.  It has to cover a lot of ground, from establishing what life is like in Barbieland to Barbie and Ken's trip to the Real World to Ken messing up Barbieland with the patriarchy (which, he admits, he pretty much lost interest in once he realized that it wasn't all about horses), and so on.  It moves right along; it never really drags, but also never feels rushed.

Anyway: fun summer movie.  Go see it with some friends.

Grandma's Marathon Race Reflection: 2023

Here's the thing about me: I am not the fastest runner, but I am consistent.  Every single road half-marathon I've raced, over the course of eleven years of racing and twenty-six half-marathons, has been run at an average pace somewhere between 8:40 and 9:45 per mile, which has resulted in a best time of 1:53:37 and a worst time of 2:07:55.  Times have started to skew a little toward the slower end over the years, but conditions like temperature, whether the course is hilly or flat, etc., have also played a role, and keeping them all that close (with most of them falling between 1:55 and 2:05) is something I'm pretty proud of.

With full marathons, I haven't had as much experience, but I have run five now, with a PR of 4:30:54 at Grandma's in 2022 and a worst time of 4:56:24 at Chicago in 2021, and, guess what? The overall time gap is bigger than with the half since I'm running twice as far, and the overall pace is a bit slower, but the pace difference (within about a minute per mile, around 10:20-11:20 in this case) is about the same.  So, when the temperatures started to climb and I started falling off goal pace at Grandma's this year, and when I crossed the finish line at 4:40:24, I was disappointed, first, to not PR, and second, not to at least get sub-4:40.  However, by the time I talked to Carrie N. on the phone on my way home from the race the next day, I had put it in the perspective of, "I think I found my range.  4:30:54 is what I can do when conditions are perfect, and 4:56:24 is what I can do when conditions are terrible, and the rest will fall somewhere in between.  And the good thing about Chicago sucking so hard is that I can always say, 'At least it wasn't as bad as Chicago!'"  I do hope that I have not peaked and that I can still hit a sub-4:30 someday, but prior to Saturday, I had PRed at every full marathon EXCEPT Chicago, and it's probably not realistic to expect that every time.  Train for it, go for it, but manage expectations and don't make it the end of the world if it doesn't happen, I think is the lesson.

Also: I was not hating my life this race.  At any distance, there have been races where I have gotten MAD, and not in the good, "My competitive spirit is revved up!" kind of way, but in the "I hate everyone and everything!" type of way.  At Chicago, for example, I remember crossing the 18-mile mark and thinking, "Eight more miles of this? REALLY?!" At the Lincoln Half this year, which was one of my worst at 2:06:16, I was ready to fling my slick-with-humidity water bottle to the side of the road, and a completely innocuous conversation between a couple of other runners made me think, "Shut UP!" I was straight-up not having a good time.  This race was not like that.  At mile 20, knowing that I had fallen off pace and not quite having it in me to pick it up, but also not feeling terrible, I thought to myself, fairly calmly, "It's just a 10K left.  You can do a 10K."  Also, though I did slow down in the second half, I don't feel like I "bonked," as I did in my first two Indianapolis marathons; I feel like I slowed down slightly and naturally as the temperature rose, which I can't say was a strategy, but I think was pretty normal.  

Other things from the race weekend as a whole that I will remember:

1) I spent the night in Minneapolis on the way so I could get to the marathon expo early enough to see Olympic marathoner Kara Goucher, who was signing her new book at the expo on Friday.  At my hotel in Minneapolis were a bunch of middle-school girls who were in town for a volleyball tournament.  I had been told there would be cookies in the lobby at 10 p.m., and since I was still up, I went down to get one.  Those middle school girls descended on those cookies like a swarm and had them gone in like thirty seconds.  There were more cookies where that came from, it turned out, but it was a pretty funny thing to watch.

2) I got to add to my collection of photos of me with famous lady marathoners, which prior to this included Kathrine Switzer, Deena Kastor, and Shalane Flanagan.  This one was the most personally significant, however, because I read Kara Goucher's book on running for women early in my running career and used to constantly talk about what "Olympic marathoner Kara Goucher" had to say about this or that.  I managed not to go on and on about that and to just say normal things like "Hi" and "Thank you" as she signed my book and took a picture with me.

3) I got to hang out with my friend Julia at her first full marathon, which she crushed! So glad we got to ride the shuttle together and hang out after the race!

I actually have ZERO races in July and August!  But I'm doing the Monument Marathon in Scottsbluff in September and the GOATz 50K in October, so training starts on July 10th.  I'm trying a different training plan geared toward the 50K which includes hill repeats, so we'll see how that goes!  The plan is to run pretty minimally this week, then take it relatively easy the two weeks after with long-ish runs at 6-8 miles.  I think a three-week training break will be about the right amount, because I had like three MONTHS after the fall racing season last year, and while it was nice to not have to follow a training plan when it was so cold, I did feel like I lost some fitness (though I was still doing some running).

Okay! Spring racing season 2023 in the books! Onward and upward!

Unpacking Daisy Jones and the Six: Daisy and Billy and Camila (Spoilers)

Billy Dunne has this version of himself that he wants to be, which is the version that stays clean and sober and is a good husband to Camila and a good father to Julia.  Then Daisy Jones enters his life, first to sing harmony on one song and then as an official member of the band, and she brings out a lot of his insecurities and challenges him in ways that he isn’t used to being challenged.  He expects her to just sing that first song, “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb)” as written.  She rewrites it, and he hates, and has a hard time admitting, that it’s better her way.  At her first live performance with the band, he tells her they’re singing the song fourth; she comes out after the first song, they do the song second, she never leaves the stage, and he hates that the fans don’t want her to.  Basically, he hates, and has a hard time admitting, that he needs her more than she needs him professionally.  There’s one point where he tries to threaten her that unless she does this or that, she’s not coming on tour, and she says, “There IS no tour without me, you stupid son of a bitch.”  He really has a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that he’s not in control with her.

He also has it in his head that as long as he never actually crosses the line of sleeping with her, he’s not doing anything wrong as far as his marriage to Camila is concerned, even though Camila literally tells him otherwise right to his face.  Literally.  She straight up tells him, “I don’t have to know everything, but if you love her—” He interrupts her to tell her he doesn’t.  She says that if he ever does, they’re over.  Yet, when Camila is upset after seeing Billy and Daisy having what is clearly an intimate conversation, he is very insistent that all they’ve done is kiss once.  He can’t get it through his head that she doesn’t care about that.  With both Daisy and Camila, he has these clear ideas about how things are going to be without it ever even occurring to him that they never agreed to those terms or that they might have their own ideas about what they want and what is important to them.

This becomes clearest when, after leaving messages for Camila begging her to give him another chance and come to the fateful Soldier Field show that winds up being their last, a fan buys him a shot, and he takes it.  He is drunk and high at the show that night, and he is different with Daisy than he ever has been before, joining her at her microphone, coming so close their lips almost touch and, at one point, putting his arms around her from behind as they sing.  When they go backstage before the encore, he begins kissing her, and she responds at first.  But she realizes he isn’t being himself and that he’s just reacting to Camila leaving him; he tells her this is who he is: broken. “Let’s be broken together,” he says.  Essentially: I couldn’t live up to Camila, so I might as well live down to you.  To Daisy’s credit, she doesn’t accept this for herself, and firmly tells him, “I don’t want to be broken.”  Daisy told him early on, when they were writing songs for the album together, that he writes from the perspective of who he wants to be, not who he really is.  Billy both loves and hates that Daisy sees who he really is, and loves, hates, and is scared of who he is with her.

Bottom line, he puts A LOT on both of the women in his life.  But Camila isn’t perfect, and Daisy isn’t “broken.”  They’re both real, human people with strengths and weaknesses, and I am really impressed that the show lets them both be that, even if Billy can’t always see them as anything but projections of what he does or doesn’t want to be.  I think it’s a huge departure from a lot of music films.  I love Walk the Line, for example, but in the context of that movie, June was there to save Johnny Cash, and his first wife, Vivian, was there to hold him back; that made sense in the context of that story, which was told from John’s perspective, and very well may have been how he saw things.  Things get more complex when you start showing events from multiple people’s perspectives, though, which we get in Daisy Jones and the Six, where there are no heroes or villains, just a bunch of flawed people trying, and sometimes failing, to do their best; sometimes bringing out the best in each other, and sometimes bringing out the worst.

GOATz 50K Race Recap

 I signed up for the GOATz 50K back in April, I think, on the day that my friend Carrie M. organized a forty-mile run as preparation for an upcoming 100-mile race she was training for.  I was in the midst of training for Grandma's Marathon at the time; I had fourteen or fifteen miles on the training schedule that day, I think, but wound up running seventeen, and signed up on the adrenaline of the day's run and the buzz of a few post-run beers.  In June, I ran a marathon PR at Grandma's and was a little dismayed to realize that training for GOATz needed to start pretty much immediately.  I took three days completely off from running and a full week off from any training plan, then went back to it.  As the fall race calendar started filling up with the Harvest Moon Hustle 10K and the Monument Half-Marathon in September, then the Market to Market relay and the Garmin Kansas City Half-Marathon in the weeks immediately leading up to GOATz, I started to wonder if I had bitten off more than I could chew.

This feeling came to a head at the GOATz preview run the weekend before Market to Market.  I already had one twenty-miler under my belt during this training cycle, but I had run it on pavement during my friend Karri's brewery run.  This time, I did two loops of the GOATz course (the 50K would be three loops) and was hit with how hard it was going to be and how long it was going to take.  Two loops (twenty-one miles) took me something like 4:35, which was slower than my most recent marathon time.  "I thought this would be okay since I've already run marathons, but those were all on flat roads!," I told my friends.  "This is on hilly trail!"  A couple of them chimed in to point out that you don't run a trail race as fast and that you hike up the hills.  "That makes it even worse!," I said.  "I'll be out there for like seven hours!" I was told that wasn't a bad time for a first 50K; I was like, "But I don't WANT to run for seven hours!"  I knew the GOATz course was a loop of 10.5 miles, and that there would also be 10.5 and 21 mile races going on at the same time.  If literally any one of my friends had been like, "Well, you know, you can always drop down to the 21," I would have been like "OKAY! YES! I'll do that!" None of them did.  

Market to Market came and went.  Garmin Kansas City came and went.  Next thing I knew, there was nothing to do but run a 50K.  The morning of the race, Jimmy Brown of Runner Church gave a short message where he quoted a Bible verse about finishing the race, and said something along the lines of, "You did not just sign up for this race to sign up, and you did not come here to just run part of the race.  You came here to finish the race, and unless you get sick or hurt, you will finish."  I looked at my friend Julia, who was also running her first 50K but was much more excited about it. I wish I could say that that's the moment where I was like "YES!," but I was still really nervous.

The race started, and everyone, except for the 50 milers, who had started at 3 a.m. (!!!) took off together.  A few of us had planned to run at least the first loop together, so during the first few miles I was mainly focused on staying with the group while everyone in the race was trying to settle into their paces.  Eventually, people spread out a little bit, and it started to feel a little more relaxed.  I had told myself I would eat something, whether the Skratch chews I had brought along or something from an aid station, every four miles, so I had six Skratch chews four miles in, then some peanut butter pretzels at the Runner Church aid station at mile eight.  The start/finish aid station at mile 10.5 marked the end of the first loop.  I used the Port-a-Potty, ate a few more pretzels, Amber refilled my water bottle for me, and then we were off again.  At that point, our group spread out a bit.  Karri was planning on pacing me for the whole thing, so she stuck with me; Anna and Julia went on ahead for awhile, then we caught them, then Julia took off at our next stop at the Runner Church aid station.  Anna was doing the 21 miler, so the end of the next loop was her last.  I made one more stop at the Port-a-Potty; Macy, who had won the 10.5 miler for the women earlier that day, refilled my water bottles; and Karri and I were off again.

Four miles into the loop, I tried to eat Skratch chews again, but after the second one I had a strong feeling that if I tried to eat any more, they would come back up.  Luckily, I was still at least able to drink water.  I think I got maybe one more Skratch chew down later down the road.  It got very windy.  At one point, where we were briefly on pavement on our way back into the woods, I felt like I was going to be blown over sideways.  Karri had been playing music for us, and at one point, "Jessie's Girl," one of my favorite songs of all time, came on.  "I'm going to do the hand-clappy part to see if I can still clap in rhythm," I told her.  I kind of could.  Running and clapping is hard, FYI.  At the Runner Church aid station, I tried to sip a little ginger ale, but since we were 2.5 miles from the end at that point, I didn't try to get anything else down.  Karri needed to put on sunscreen, so she told me to go on ahead and she would catch me.  After the Runner Church station, you ran up a grassy hill, crossed some pavement, and went back into the woods.  At that point, I tripped over a root.  I caught myself and didn't hit the ground.  Still, I shouted, "THIS SUCKS!" to the heavens.  Karri caught up with me again.  The next thing that stands out is that there was a big hill, and Karri was like, "What song can I play to get you up this hill?," and I was like, "Nothing."  Like, not in the mood for songs right now, let's just finish this thing.  (Later, I realized that "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" would have been the correct answer.)  We crossed the finish line in 6:58:34, so I was pretty right when I predicted that I would be out there for "like seven hours."  Our friends were there to cheer us in at the finish line.

I went and sat at a picnic bench.  Then I wanted to lie on the ground, so Carrie M. went and got a blanket.  Then I drank some ginger ale.  Then my stomach started to settle down.  I drank a Coke.  Eventually, we went our separate ways and made plans for dinner later.  I went home, took a shower, ate some Pringles, and by the time we were on our way to dinner, I said to Karri, "I reserve the right to change my mind on this, but I have felt worse after other races."  I threw up at the finish line of my first half-marathon.  I ran a 15K trail run in July heat back in 2012 that I still refer to as Death in the Woods.  Lying on a blanket feeling a little queasy didn't seem terrible by comparison.

We all went out for dinner, and Theresa asked me what the best and worst parts were.  I was quick to recount the queasiness as the worst part.  Then I said that the best part was the camaraderie, and I can't stress that enough.  Between getting to run the first loop with Karri, Ross, Anna, and Julia, Karri pacing me the whole way, Macy and Amber there at the aid stations, everyone there at the finish, and still more people there to congratulate all of us on Tuesday at run group, I felt so supported before, during, and after.  My friends are so great.

I drank a beer that was literally the size of my head that night.  That seems like an important detail.

I didn't sleep well that night and woke up sore the next day.  I got a really good night's sleep on Monday and woke up even more sore on Tuesday.  Tuesday night, I went to IRRC and walked with Julia and Theresa.  Afterwards, I talked to Carrie M. and said, "I feel like with races like this, it's you versus the course," and she said, "That's exactly right." I planned to take a full week off running and have stuck to that so far, but I am mostly not sore anymore and starting to feel a little antsy.  Still, with midterm grades due today and some fun social plans coming up this weekend, it should be easy enough to wait until Sunday.

Some takeaways:

1) The three weeks between the preview run and the race were very stressful and full of self-doubt.  However, I'm VERY glad that I did the preview run and kind of got real with myself about how things were going to be.  Up to that point, I think I thought it was going to be "not that much harder" than running a marathon.  It was a lot harder.  I'm glad I was prepared for that.  It's not good to be so scared that you talk yourself out of things, but it's also not good to kid yourself or not take things seriously enough.

2) That said, I actually was fairly physically prepared at that point, or I wouldn't have gotten through it.  I basically adapted the Hal Higdon Intermediate 1 plan that I did for Grandma's Marathon, doing more runs on trails and adjusting as I needed to for other races.  I totaled up and figured out that I did 88% of the workouts on the plan, giving me a B+ for preparedness.  Though I joked with my friends about the fact that I calculated all that and graded myself and all, I think it was actually a pretty good gauge, and think that in the A-/B+ range is a good place to be; I don't want to ever be so rigid that I can't ever miss a workout, but I also am not someone who "wings" things.  I would not have done it if I was not actually prepared.

3) I started my adult running career (I ran track and cross country in high school) in the year 2011.  I've run alone, with different small groups of friends, and with organized training groups, and I imagine that I will run as long as I am able and still liking it regardless of where I am or who I'm with.  However.  It's my friends who have consistently helped me level up and supported me.  In 2018, after finishing the Kentucky Derby Mini-Marathon, showering, and venturing back out for lunch, my friends and I passed people who were finishing the full.  While I was thinking, "Man, I'm so glad I didn't do the full! That looks terrible!," Carrie N. was like, "If they can do it, we can do it."  I was like, "FINE." So we registered for the Monumental Marathon in Indianapolis that fall, trained together, and my friends Alice and Shannon surprised me at the finish line with signs they had made.  At lunch, they gave me a decorated box full of cards and gifts from other friends who couldn't come but wanted to show their support.  The next year, Alice brought our friends Mel and Erin along.  I still remember (and have video somewhere) of running down the stretch before I made the last turn to the finish and seeing them cheering.  There was a woman holding a sign that said "Tap here to power up" with the mushroom from Super Mario Brothers, and Alice started shouting, "TAP THE SIGN! TAP THE SIGN!" I still giggle when I think about it.  Then I moved to Omaha, and was introduced to the Omaha running community through the Inner Rail Run Club; it was the friends I met there who introduced me to trail running.  I knew ultrarunning existed before meeting them, but I had never actually known anyone who had run further than a marathon.  I started thinking about it, but when I got into the Chicago Marathon in 2021, my focus all went toward training for that (though I did some shorter trail races throughout the year).  So, this was the year.  Thanks so much to Karri, Carrie M., Julia, Anna, Amber, Macy, Theresa, and the MANY other awesome people who did training runs with me, ran with me for all or part of the race itself, or were there at the finish line-- all while working toward their own goals.  Would I run on my own?  Yes, but definitely not as far, and it definitely wouldn't be as fun.

Monument Half-Marathon Race Recap

I used to be able to hit sub-two hours in the half-marathon consistently, with just the occasional exception on an especially hilly course or a really hot, humid day, until 2019, at which point it became much more hit or miss.  I hit it most recently in October 2019 at the Evansville Half with a time of 1:55:56.  Though I'm sure age has something to do with the difference, I will also say that nine of my top twelve half times (I've run twenty-three road half-marathons) were at the Evansville Half, which is held in early October; the weather tends to be cool, and the course is mostly flat.  There was bound to be more variation once I started branching out more frequently to different courses, running them at different times of year, training for longer distances, and doing the occasional not-that-smart thing like running halfs on back-to-back weekends.

This past Saturday I ran the Monument Half-Marathon in Gering, Nebraska, and I knew a sub-two time was probably not in the cards when miles two and three were both up the same, seemingly endless hill.  The first mile was downhill; when my watch chimed and I had an 8:31 pace, I wasn't sure whether to think, "Oooh, you went out too fast," or, "It's fine, you have some time banked now," or just, "Well, that was downhill, who cares?" A woman running near me, who I will refer to as My Musical Friend because she was playing music over her phone, and throughout the race I would speed up when I heard the music coming behind me, scolded her husband for pacing them too fast during the first mile.  During the second mile, when we all started uphill, he said something to her like, "Look, I will stay with you until it doesn't make sense anymore."  My watch chimed at the end of the second mile: 9:39.  "Oooohhh," I said aloud, in a tone like, "That's not good."  My Musical Friend said, "It's okay.  It'll even out with the downhills."  That made sense at that point, since my first mile was about thirty seconds too fast and the second was about thirty seconds too slow for the pace I was trying to hit...but then mile three continued uphill.  "Just go!" My Musical Friend said to her husband.  Up ahead, another woman urged her friend to go on ahead of her; the hills were breaking up duos left and right.  Mile three was another 9:39.  The hill finally started to descend at mile four, but not quite at the same degree; mile four was 9:07, which was better and back on pace, though not enough faster to make up tons of ground.

A few things happened relatively simultaneously at mile five: the course turned onto a gravel road; the half-marathon relay, which started thirty minutes after the half-marathon, had its first exchange point, so there was a "Why are there so many people just standing around?" moment; and the course became just BEAUTIFUL.  If you've ever been to the Scottsbluff/Gering area, you know that it is beautiful in general, but at this point there were some Badlands-like formations that you don't normally see.  We were running on a gravel road around the back side of the Scottsbluff National Monument, which you don't normally have a reason to go to.  Also at this point, us runners spread out a bit more.  I passed an older man who had started alternating between running and walking.  Occasionally, I would hear My Musical Friend's music behind me, then the music would fade again.  One thing with the early uphill miles was that you started to see people struggling earlier in the race than you normally would.  I wouldn't say I was struggling, but I did consciously adjust my goal from sub-two to "just try to keep all your miles under ten minutes."

Things kind of became a blur around mile seven or eight.  My Musical Friend disappeared somewhere behind me (I wish I knew her real name so I could look up how she finished).  We got back on pavement as the course turned onto the paved bike/running trails near the monument.  My parents were cheering two different places.  The first, my dad called out that I was twenty-fourth out of the women.  The second, my mom called out, "Molly! Look who's here!  It's Kaitlyn!"; my cousin's daughter was volunteering with some fellow nursing students.  The course kind of zig-zagged through some neighborhoods, with arrows on the ground pointing our way and volunteers in the confusing spots.  We switched back to gravel to head back to the start/finish at Five Rocks Amphitheater, running past a cemetery.  There was another downhill, and a volunteer kept calling out to us to watch ourselves on the gravel.  Next thing I knew I was crossing the finish.  My time was 2:07:55, far off the goal (hope?), but sometimes you adjust as you go when the course is more challenging than expected.  Final results were 24/125 women and 61/218 overall.

It was a great race.  I really enjoyed the mixture of pavement and gravel, and the scenery was beautiful.    Since it was a smaller race, you spread out a bit more than you typically would in a road half-marathon; the person who finished before me was forty seconds ahead, while the person behind was more than twenty seconds back.  I think I'm going to go back for the full next year.  For the full, they bus you out to the Wildcat Hills, and the first five miles are downhill.  Their second half overlaps with the half-marathon course.  I imagine pacing would be challenging since the second half is the more difficult half.  At any rate, I'd like to try it.  I think I love smaller races.  

One of the sponsors was the Flyover Brewery, and they offered a free beer if you brought your race bib in before six p.m.  My parents and I went sometime between five and six, and there were lots of people there wearing their race shirts, and the race director was coming around talking to everyone and thanking us for being there.  The proceeds go to scholarships at Western Nebraska Community College, so she emphasized how much they have raised since they started doing the race.  The whole community was really supportive of the race.  I would definitely recommend.