Belated Race Report - Whine On The Vine 7/19/15

I love X-Dog Events. I discovered them the first spring we lived here, which would have been early 2007, when I ran the Dirt Dash. For years I've run several races a year with X-dog, and have seen them grow from a pretty small operation that seemed to run out of an old school bus to the still small but glorious operation it is today. They were doing obstacle runs before obstacle running was a thing. Not that obstacles are *my* thing, but I'm willing to crawl over, under, around, and through some stuff to get where I'm going.

A few years back, X-dog offered their last Tillamook Burn race, as the private property on which it was held was sold. Bummer, because that was a hell of a challenging 7-mile run.

In its wake, however, we got the Whine On The Vine Adventure Run. This one is held at the lovely J Albin winery in Hillsboro. (FWIW, I'm always surprised this is Hillsboro - it must be the very bottom left corner of it, because it feels more like Newburg). This year was the third annual WotV event. The first year, I failed to follow the course properly and almost accidentally came in first place. I skipped a really big hill, and had to back-track until I found the people I'd been running near in the first place and picked the course back up. Disappointing, but so it goes among really rugged trails. 

Last year and this year I followed the course better and fared relatively well.

At J Albin winery in July, it is very dry and dusty. This year it was especially so, as we had a very hot, dry summer here in Oregon. As we weaved back and forth through the grapes, we kicked up a lot of dust. Usually after the grapes, we head out into a large, open field and traverse 3 or 4 obstacles. This year, it was so hot, and the race organizers opted to forego a couple of the obstacles and head us into the forest sooner. They elongated the forest part of the run to make up for the lost mileage. The terrain in the forest is beautiful. Sometimes the path is one-person wide, sometimes less than that. Blackberry bramble and even one instance of barbed wire threatened the shins as we went up and down the steepest hills. I fell twice, which is not unusual on this kind of path, although it was a little comical this year, as my two falls were about 20 feet apart. I'm sure the people running near me thought I might be one of the obstacles.

As tends to be the case in these races, starting off slowly worked to my advantage. As we got to about mile 3 of the 5.15-mile course, I passed many of the people who blasted by me in the first mile, and by the time we got to the Redneck Slip-n-slide (a big tarp running all the way down a steep hill, manned by a few volunteers with hoses), I was the third woman. I didn't gain any position after that, but I did keep third place female (and passed a few men on the last mile).

In the end, I was just the right combination of muddy, bloody, and dusty, and ready for the complimentary finish-line mimosas.