Date: April 14, 2018
Purpose: first official trail race of the year!
Distance: 26.2 miles
My short term work assignment was forcing me to go to
Richmond from Monday through Thursday of each week. During the month of April,
I kept this routine for 4 weeks in a row! All that time in the airport was
starting to get old doing the speed walks to the gates and the frisks through
security.
When I returned to SLC that Friday, I looked to the foothills on the
east side of the valley to notice they had all been sprinkled with sugar. In
other words, they had received snow that day. And the Bonneville Shoreline
Trail Marathon was the next morning. Secretly hoping the race would be
postponed, I reached out to my friend Scott to ask him if there was any chance
the race would be called off or at least delayed due to the weather. His answer
was swift: “dude, they do this race in any trail or weather conditions.” My
hopes were dashed.
The race start was nice because, well, it wasn’t much of a
start at all. You just showed up on the
Shoreline Trail as it weaves south
around the Huntsman Cancer Center, get some brief instructions from the race
director, around 7 am and begin running. The race fee was also nice because,
well, there wasn’t much of a fee at all. My entrance cost was a donated trail
snack of my choice, in my case Kind Bars. “If it is for free, it is for me, and
I’ll take three.” This was a nice reprieve after the $220 cost to run the
Wasatch 100.
Wetzel and I stuck together on this one for pretty much the
entire race, which had about 80 entrants total. I got no more than 0.25 miles
ahead of him, but I always felt him behind me trying to reel me in. What became
difficult was at about miles 16-24: the snow had not yet melted on this section
of the trail course. It became a muddy, slushy, sloggy mess due to all the foot
traffic combined with a single track with a couple of inches of rapidly melting
snow on top. Everyone I saw on this section of the course was slipping.
Everyone had an extra couple of pounds of mud on their shoe treads they would
carry with each step. And nearly everyone was slowing way down on this section.
Finally, we got to the top of Dry Canyon at mile 24 and the
trail dried out again. After kicking off the mud globs on my shoes, I was able
to pick up speed for the last mile for a strong finish.
While eating free snacks at the impromptu finish line of
this race, all I remember thinking is that for The Wasatch, I would have to run
4 times what I had just done. Ouch!
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