Six of us ladies loaded up in a minivan on Friday morning and headed out. We made it about 2 miles before we stopped at Starbucks. 😊 It’s about a 5-hour drive and started raining on us when we were almost at our destination. We ate lunch, went to the local Fleet Feet store for packet pickup, stopped by the grocery store and headed then to our condo. The rain stopped long enough for us to get a two and one-half mile walk in on the beach. As forecasted, we awoke the next morning to the wind howling and rain hitting the windows. There was a gale warning in effect all day. The temp though was in the mid-60s--thankfully not too cold under those conditions. We were about 15 minutes away from the park where the race was being held. We had planned to set up our canopy tent the night before but because of the weather forecast we decided to wait until Saturday morning and were glad we did because some other people who sat theirs up on Friday had them mangled by the wind.

The race began at 7:00 am. I think I described it earlier but in case you don’t remember, the 50K is set up so that you run a 5K every hour on the hour for 10 hours. You have to finish within the hour and can’t start your next one before the top of the hour. Everyone sets up tents at the start/finish area, the race directors provide wonderful food all day long, a coffee truck is there etc. It’s like an outdoor music festival for runners. As you can imagine it sells out far in advance. This was my fourth year participating. This time, I was on a 2-person relay so I ran Loops, 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9. My teammate is training for a marathon so she also ran loops 1 and 3 with me in addition to her assigned loops. You can run them in any order that you want. We decided to rotate every loop but two others in our group ran 2 each twice and then one each.

It rained off and on (not heavy) for about the first three hours. During this time, those in our group not out on the course had to hold the tent down to keep it from blowing away even though we had it anchored pretty good. The course was dirt with a few rocks and roots but no significant elevation gain. As expected, it was muddy in places but not bad. The first loop my Garmin measured it at 3.56 miles and I heard other people say they measured closer to 4 miles. The race director adjusted the route and my next loop was only 2.99 miles… I guess it all evened out in the long run. My total for the day was 15.59 running miles. The rain stopped around 11:00 am and the sun came out. Even though the wind was blowing it wasn’t as bad and the temperature got up to about 70F before it started dropping.

By the time the last loop of the day rolled around it was about 45F but the sun was still shining. Everyone traditionally participates in the last loop whether it’s your assigned loop or not albeit walking instead of running if it’s not your assigned loop or you just don’t care at that point. Most people had a cold beverage of some sort in their hand during this loop.

My observance of annoying things from the day (it’s short):
• Not using ear buds and listening to music through their speaker phones while running. (This caused me to pick up the pace a couple of times just to distance myself from them.)
• Nothing wrong with walking. I love walking but for the love of all things, be considerate of others and don’t walk three abreast blocking the path, especially in a trail race please!


Our group heading out for the last loop (I walked the last one in my flip flops.)

The last few yards to the start/finish line were down this beautiful tree lined path. Run 4P = Run for Peyton - the little boy who tragically died when he was 9 years old. His parents organize the race in his memory.