2011 JFK 50 Miler

Back in the early summer there was great interest by many people to go and run the JFK 50 Miler and with the new registration process you had to be sure in July that you wanted to go, otherwise you were not getting in.

My plan was to try and get a male and a female team down to JFK and thought it was going to be hard to get a women's team but I should have more than enough guys to field the three person team.  In the end, I was the lone male and I was able to get a very strong female team signed up.

Fast forward to November.  In one form or another all of the runners that were doing JFK were at my race the RI 6 Hour.  I felt like all I needed to do was get through the 6 hour then I could finally focus on JFK.  Up until then I hadn't given much thought to many of the plans we had to make for JFK because I was pre-occupied with the 6 Hour organization.

Once the 6 Hour was put to rest for another year, we made some travel plans and on Friday morning around 7am the 4 runners plus Karen's husband Kevin and daughter Eva were off to Hagerstown, MD.  Fortunately the ride was uneventful and we arrived around the time we had planned.  We were staying at the host hotel where packet pick-up was, so it made things even simpler the day before the race, we checked-in, brought our stuff to our rooms, grabbed our race numbers and then all went out for a short run to loosen up the legs after being crammed in a car for a good part of the day.

Two friends that Jackie and I know from Canada were going to be at the race and we had hoped to have them join our crew of 6 for dinner and as though all the planets lined up we bumped into them at the packet pick-up and they were staying right accross from an Olive Garden, so they got there a little early put our name in the hat and by the time we arrived we only had about a half an hour wait.  It seemed everything was coming together well for us and we would be able to eat, get back to the hotel room early, get our stuff together and get to bed early so we could be awakened at 4:30 am for the start of our long race day.

Race morning came fast, but everyone seemed to have rested well.   We drove from Hagerstown to Boonsboro in the dark of morning and arrived at the school for the pre-race meeting and/or to stand in a line for the bathroom, depending on who you were.  Once the meeting was over we made our trek to the starting line, which is over a half mile from the school.  As soon as we arrived, we hear "Three minutes until the start"  WHOA!  that came quick.  The four of us quickly stripped down to our race gear and moved a little closer to the front and before we knew it BANG!  the 2011 JFK 50 had started.

The race starts on a main paved road, which you are on for just over 2 miles and in that time you climb around 1000 feet.  I stayed slow and behind many people that I would later pass, but knew there was no need to sprint out in the first miles, because this was going to be a long day.

After those climbing road miles were over you dropped into a short trail section, which was just a short tease of the terrain that would come soon after.  The short trail section lead us to another paved road that would again rise about for over a mile before we finally got onto the AT section that we would stay on until about 15.5 miles.

The AT section is very rocky and is covered in many, many, leaves.  I saw numerous people take tumbles in front of me, just as I had in 2007, but this year I was careful and never even came close to hitting the ground.   For most of the AT I was running with Ian Torrence.  This was his 17th time running this race, so I knew, he knew what he was doing, however earlier in the race he stated that he would not break 7 hours this year, so although it was nice to follow him through the AT, once we hit the canal path at 15.5 I had to get down to buisness because I had some time to make up.

The C&O Canal Path was mostly uneventful.  The path is basically a marathon and has no turns to speak of.  It is flat and made up of hard packed dirt, it was a little forgiving on the legs, but tough to keep the mind in the game when fatigue and boredom sets in.  I thought I handled both well, and when hit with what I thought was going to be a major breakdown I stepped up to the challenge and worked through it and finally made it to the end of the canal path and was about to start the 8+ mile trek on the rolling pavement that would lead me to the finish line.

The last 8 miles had each mile marked in reverse order.  It was a nice little countdown to the end.  At first 8 to go seemed short, but then 4 to go seemed like the longest run I would ever have to conquer.  By the time I got to the 1 mile to go mark I was happy the race was almost over.  Content that I would run under 7 hours and just got it in.  It was a nice way to finish the race.  I wasn't in horrible pain as I have been in at the end of the other two 50s that I had run and I was able to run every step of this race and the last mile would be no different.  I cruised in at 8 min pace, came down the final 600 meter which is a slight uphill and heard my name over the loud speaker.  I had finished in 23rd place in 6:55:08, a time I was happy with, but you always want more.

Now that I had finished, my attention turned to the women.  When would I see them come in, how was their race going?  I had no clue how the last 7 hours had gone for them.  The good thing was I did not have to wait long for the answer.  Karen was seen coming down the long straight away with another woman on her tail.  She was able to hold her off and finished as 4th woman in 7:07:35.  Not too long after we spot Jackie's bright green shirt.  She was going to smash her sub 7:30 goal with a time of 7:19:53 and a 7th place finish in the women's division.

Now we waited for Issy, we knew that with a descent finish from her that the women would not only win the team title, but would beat the women's team record from 2002.  Fortunately for us we did not have to wait in suspense too long, Issy had run faster than she thought she would, running an 8:20:29.  The girls smashed the old team record of 25:11:16 with a 3 person total of 22:47:57! 

2011 Women's Team Champions!

In the end we were all pretty happy with our results.  We went in to the gym to warm up, get some food and wait for the awards.  After that we jumped on a trolley bus type of vehicle which carried us about a half mile to the car and we were off, back to the hotel.  After taking a very refreshing shower we went to a restaurant called Barefoot Bernies to grab some grub and a celebratory beer.  After that the group, minus Jackie and I went to Dairy Queen for some more celebrating!

The night ended in true Turtle fashion with Jackie, Issy and myself pouring some bombers into some pint glasses and falling asleep while still chatting...I would say it was a successful trip.

Jackie, Me, Issy, Karen...the morning after.

TransRockies Wrap-up

So all the racing was finally done.  We checked in to our hotel, went through our bags yadda yadda...showered up and headed downstairs to the hotel lobby to check into our flight which was scheduled to fly out on Saturday @ 1:45pm.  I go to the computer, put in the info and AHHH, CANCELLED!  Damn Hurricane Irene had caused chaos in the flights around the U.S. especially in New England.  So now we had about an hour and a half to figure something out before the after party.  I attempted to book another flight heading out earlier, and got to the PURCHASE button and bam...someone got the last seat before me.  So when all was said and done we booked a flight for Monday instead of Saturday and were going to stay for 2 extra nights in a rinky dink hotel near the Denver Airport for two nights before heading back to RI.

Before we got there however, we had some celebrating to do.  The final dinner for the Transrockies was in the Beaver Creek Resort Ballroom.  The food was great, there was some free beer, and good company with AJ and Keri Wheeler and Thor, Jay, and their wives.  This was our finally hurrah with these guys and we enjoyed every minute of it.

After dinner it was the same ol' routine.  Awards, photos, and videos...but this time it was an accumulation of the whole week!  There was a lot to watch and crazy how some of the events seemed so long ago even though it was only a few days.

Once all that was over we had to say our goodbyes to AJ and Keri.  They were not going to the 7th Stage, as the Transrockies people called it, instead they had to get back to their hotel because they had an early departure in the AM.  It was pretty weird saying goodbye to them as we had spent most of the week hanging out, and now we wouldn't see them in the morning and didn't know if or when we would ever see them again.

On the other had we were STUCK with Thor and Jay.  They were going to the 7th Stage, which by the way is the after party to the final banquet, and not only that they lived in Massachusetts, so it will be hard going more than a few months without seeing them...DAMN!  (I hope they don't read this)

The 7th stage was held at some bar I can't remember the name of and this place, even though was in a resort, looked very "Colorado" to me, it probably looked that way because it was a resort.  There were animals hanging from the wall, there was a red glow to the place, and it was packed!  We were fortunate enough to get in there pretty early and get a table for the 6 or us.  We had a few Colorado brews took in the scenes and around midnight decided to call it a day.  We said our goodbyes to the Kirleiss' and Newtons' and headed back to a night in a BED, no more air mattress for us!

The rest of the story is unimportant and irrelevant to Transrockies the race, so I will keep it short.  With our whole travel debacle, we took our reserved shuttle from Vail to the Denver airport...but we had no plane, so we took the Comfort Inn Hotel shuttle to our hotel.  On the way we passed a few dozen hotels, all nice and close to all the restaurants that Avon, CO had to offer, our hotel was just over a mile from those - damn.  So for the next day and a half we walked over to these restaurants for lunch and dinner, we ran one of the days, and other then that we sat in the hotel watching movies.  I was a little scared to go in the pool, and one of the vending machines had expired food, but other than that it was a good time :).

Finally Monday came and we made our way to the airport to get out of Colorado and back home to see if there was any damage and hoping we had power as many were still out.  We were good on all matters, so that was a relief.

Sooo...Tranrockies was a cool experience.  It was one of those races I saw in an ad for awhile and couldn't get my mind off of, so I decided we should do it.  Would we do it again?  Yes, but it wouldn't be anytime soon, the race is just too damn expensive.

I do think running this race is a cool way to roam the Colorado mountains without having to worry about much other than running, so that was nice and I would definitely recommend the race if anyone asked about it.

Before we left for CO, a lot of people said "you are going to want to move out there when you get back"  etc.  So many people said this that I was planning on moving out there before we even left!  But Jackie and I both felt Colorado isn't the place to be.  It is nice, but we still love RI too much to leave everything behind!

...and because I forgot about this in all of these posts, here is a short list of some of the gear that we had with us, not including all the obvious shorts and tops etc.
Brooks Cascadia
Brooks Arm Sleeves
Salomon XT Advance Skin 5 S-Lab Set Pack  (I carried everything so Jackie didn't have to)
Ultimate Direction Fastdraw Plus Handheld Bottles
Nuun Electrolyte Tabs

Final Results

Here are a few final photos...finally I can write about something else!

Final awards dinner

Wall art...

Some more of that.

This is what everything looks like at Stage 7

Stage 4 - Nova Guides-Red Cliff

Stage 4, I returned from the dead.  After running really conservative on stages 2 and 3 I felt good enough before stage 4 that I thought we could run more like ourselves.  As good as I felt, we were both starting to get pretty sore from the first three days of running.  We still started out on the slow side but right from the start we saw that we were closer to some of the teams that we hadn't been around since stage 1.  Stage 4 was only 14.2 miles but you start out climbing for the first 5 miles.  After all that climbing you pop out on the top of the mountain, at least what you think is the top, there was still one more climb from about 7 to 7.5 miles that we needed to get up before descending for the remainder of the run.  Most of this course seemed to be dirt roads that were wide, but when we started to come off the mountain there was a good amount of loose rock, which we navigated well enough, but technical down hill running was not our strength at TRANSROCKIES!

One of the cool things about this stage was with about 3 miles to go you began a 1 mile trek through a riverbed.  There were times that the water was just a few inches deep, but other times it was calf deep or more.  Once through that mess you popped out onto a dirt road that was a gradual 2 miles all the way to the finish.  On this road we were really able to open it up and passed multiple teams.  This was by far the strongest we had finished for the week, and it was a good day to feel good at the end because Mango's Mountain Grill and taco's were waiting for us when we were done!

Today's creek to bath in was by far the coldest!  We were lucky to get in and out of there before the temperatures dropped a little bit and some rain rolled in.  Finally we used the mandatory gear, but it wasn't for the race, it was for sitting on the balcony at Mango's sipping on a Guinness and eating some tacos.  

Once back at camp we had a lot of time to waste, we listened to a talk from the founder of Salt Stick and had a drink courtesy of the roaming Margarita bar.   And to sound like a broken record, dinner was wonderful again, with the photos, videos, etc. etc.  

4 days down two to go!

Up we go.

Running in the river.

Have I told you about Red Cliff?

Mango's

Our group hanging out on the balcony.

Roaming Margarita Bar

Some of the ladies were lonely, so they found a friend.

Pre-Race Buena Vista

So we were to stay 2 nights in Buena Vista before the race started on August 21st.  Our bus dropped us off at the Central Colorado Regional Airport which was over a mile from the Lakeside Motel which we were staying.  This isn't usually a big deal, but we had 4 bags with us, 2 which were carry-on rolling bags and over half the distance was on a gravel path/road.  My Dockers bag held up well, but if I am ever in the market for another bag, I will be looking for one with much larger wheels!  We finally jumped on some pavement and were walking through a small residential section of Buena Vista when Jackie said "I wonder what these people are thinking when they see us walking down the street with all this baggage"  a moment later a woman and her husband asked us where we were going and if we needed a ride.  I jumped right on that, so we threw our stuff in the trunk of their car, explained what the hell we were doing and 5 mins later we were at the hotel giving them thanks and were checking in for the night.

Shortly after arriving we headed out for our first run at 8000+ feet.  We went down Main Street and into the trails where the race would be starting.  It was so much better then running in downtown Denver that I wished we could have kept on going, but with the race starting in two days we had to keep it easy and only ran 35 mins.

To stick with the routine, after we ran, we showered and headed to a brewpub.  The fact that Buena Vista had a brewpub was amazing because this is a pretty small town with a population under 2,200.  The Eddyline Restaurant & Brewery did not disappoint.  They had a well rounded beer selection and some tasty food.  Since the TRANSROCKIES race basically doubles the population of Buena Vista, there was a short wait for a table at Eddyline, so we made our way to the bar and ordered a round  of the Pine Creek Porter.  After about 25 mins we sat and order up some grub, we started with the Dough Twists and then I had the Cheddar Penne Macaroni with Salad and Jackie had the Creamy Pesto Pasta with a Salad.  During dinner we also sampled the South Main Stout and Crank Yanker IPA.  And just for the record everything we consumed at Eddyline was great.

August 20th.  This was our last night before the race and our last night in Buena Vista.  We headed out around 9 a.m. to get an easy 25 min run in then walked over to the Buena Vista Roastery and picked up some coffee.  From there we walked over to the trail and checked out some of the sites including an old mining cave entrance.  We went back to the hotel for a bit then headed back to Eddyline for lunch.  We again had a good meal and were satisfied with our last meal before the TRANSROCKIES race catering took over at dinner.  On our way back to the motel we stopped by the Buena Vista Heritage Museum to pick up our race packets which included two huge bags to lug around all of our 'stuff' for the week.  We also were given a race shirt, hat, Peet shoe dryers, and some other miscellaneous schwag.  Now that we had our race bags we had some work to do, we had to fit all of our gear for the week in these bags.  The positive thing is all we had to do once packed was leave them in front of the motel on race morning and a race truck would come by and pick them up and have them for us at the end of Stage 1.  They also took our other luggage and put it on a truck and it would make its way to the final stage where we would pick it up.

This shows how big these bags were!

After some packing and some relaxing it was finally time to get on with the pre-race dinner/info session.  We made our way back down Main Street and what would become a common occurence all week, we were one of the first to arrive at dinner.  The pre-race dinner was something we would have to get used to because we had alot of it all week, fajitas.  There was a buffet line set-up with chicken, beef, onions, peppers, cheese and all the other mexican fixens.  There were also cookies...and I like cookies.  We bellied up to a table and met a team that consisted of a dude from Colorado and a woman from South Africa, after that we met a big group that was from Washington D.C.  A little while later Thor and Jay of Team HumpMe & DumpMe showed up with their wives.

After dinner we went through the first pre-race course preview and got a bit of an overview of all things TRANSROCKIES.  We were finally feeling like the race was on and went back to the motel with full stomachs and excitment for what the first race day would bring.  All that was left to do was finish packing and get a good nights sleep, especially since this would be our last night during the race that we had a real bed in a room...  Stay Tuned for Stage 1 Buena Vista to Red Bridge.  In the meantime enjoy some photos.

Some Buena Vista scenery

Abandoned Mine

Cool old place

COFFEE!

Some more old town.

Inside Eddyline

Lunch @ Eddyline