So the gist of it is that I turned 50 this year. And I *LOVE* my birthday. I'm very protective of the day, as it's close to, and often on, Mother's Day, and I want my whole day without sharing it with Mother's Day, even for myself. So there was this race, the Smith Rock Ascent, which I'd thought about for several years, but it was always on my birthday weekend, but this year, my 50th birthday was coming up, and I thought 50k for 50 years seemed like a good idea. My birthday, May 10, was on a Friday, so I thought that a Saturday or Sunday race , would be a perfect celebration. So I signed up, planning on a fun weekend in Bend, OR. My sweet friend Rachel books a couple rooms at her timeshare for the weekend. A few weeks later, we hear from the event that they are moving the event away from Mother's Day for the first time to accommodate more people. Uggh. Fine. Rachel is cool and reschedules.
Anyway, things are fine, and I'm looking forward to it. The idea of a 50k is a bit daunting, but at this point I have run 17 marathons, so I know I can do the distance, but it's a little different in a 50k. This is about to be my 3rd 50k, and my first at altitude, and my first with any significant elevation change. I'm jazzed about it, though, and the 6 weeks between the Oakland Marathon on 3/27 and the Smith Rock Ascent on 5/18 is spent happily listening to Deena Kastor's audiobook Let Your Mind Run while racking up miles of trail and elevation along the trails of Forest Park here in Portland. We are fortunate to have hundreds of miles of beautiful trail on which to train, and I covered much of it over those weeks, getting inspired by Deena's empowering story. I was super jazzed to really try myself at the 50k distance. I said I had no particular time goal, but since I was entering a new age group, I figured I had a shot at an AG win, but still my goal was set on 50-for-50, and I was going to be happy with whatever. I set my Garmin for kilometers instead of miles to track my progress.
As the day approached, I had made the decision to think about my 50 years of life along the route. I would literally meditate on each of my 50 years with each of the 50 kilometers, and write about it here in my blog. Maybe even publish it. Here I am at the starting line:
Well, that didn't work out as expected. I actually had a really good run, took some great pictures, and had reminisced all the way up to just before I turned 32, when I found out I was pregnant with my 2nd daughter. Right there at Kilometer 31.7-ish, my phone rang, and I got the news that there had been an emergency and I needed to get back to the finish line ASAP. I'm not here to tell anyone else's story, so I won't get into that, but it was a stressful journey back to the bottom, and my second ever DNF, and everyone is okay, but it was a bad day.
Once I knew everyone was okay, I hoped it wouldn't be too weird to try another race. I had all this good training, and the very next week there was a popular 50k in Forest Park. Less exciting than Smith Rock, since I'd done literally *all* my trail training on those exact trails, but it was easy to get to and the timing was good. The race was full, and they wouldn't squeeze me in (same race directors as the Smith Rock), but they said if I showed up with cash in hand I could get in if there were no-shows. I wasn't sure how high to get my hopes, but I carbed up and showed up, and I got in, along with all the other day-of hopefuls.
The weather was gorgeous. A light, cooling rain at the start made for a cool, damp forest in which to run. I didn't have anyone I knew on course with me, so I set about recounting my 50 years in 50 kilometers as internal dialog. I started by thinking about all the things that happened in 1969, such as the moon landing and Woodstock Festival. I thought about this as I climbed the Wild Cherry Trail - a climb of 500 feet over one mile.
Year by year I went through the early 1970s. I thought about the music that was popular at the time, and talk about how my family was living in Chicago and I wondered about what my parents were like - so young at the time, and still married to each other, which I barely remember. I thought about the fashion of the time - so much orange, avocado, corduroy, and plaid. At 4 kilometers, I tried to remember moving from the Chicago area to the upper peninsula of Michigan. I did remember how the forests smelled up there. Similar to Oregon. Coming up Wild Cherry only to drop back down and then hit the steep climb at Holman Lane created a lot of leapfrogging among the runners.
The late 1970s were a little more tumultuous. We moved down into the mitten part of Michigan, and my parents split up. My brother and I changed schools every year, and it was hard for me as a painfully shy kid to make friends, but I always did. My dad had moved to Germany for a few years with his company, and we spent the summer of 1978 there with him and my stepmother, as well as a little more than a year, beginning the next summer, traveling all around Western Europe, which was an amazing and life-altering experience for us both. These kilometers, 6-10, were pretty comfortable. I run a lot on Wildwood, and this was all Wildwood. Not easy, but nothing like the elevation of the east/west trails.
Kilometer 11. Now it's 1980. Oddly this decade had its own loop on the course. Firelane 1 was a steep downhill followed by a ascent back up the nature trail. There was an aid station at the closure of the loop, so I passed it at around mile 7 and 9. I didn't need it, so I pushed through. The next few years were also full of ups and downs. When my brother Tim and I returned to the U.S., our mother had moved to Florida to be near her mother, and moving from northern West Germany to scorpion-infested central Florida was an unpleasant culture shock. Add to that that I was now in 6th grade, which was middle school in my new town, and I was unprepared socially. But we weren't there long: we moved to Boulder, Colorado just a few months into my 6th grade year. Now I was back in elementary school, and still shy and awkward, but it was easier to make friends in the primary school environment. The next year we moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, where I would live until I graduated high school. While I ran steep downs and ups, I thought about myself in middle school. I was weird, and south Texas was diffferent from anywhere I'd lived before. I was dorky and over-eager to be liked. As I ran, I thought about how hard it is to be that age. Running hills was cake in comparison.
Now it's the late 1980s. The miles were easier than the years. Real coming of age stuff. I enjoyed high school for the most part, and was a pretty typical kid - I was on the dance team, I was interested in clothes and music and spent most of my waking hours with my girlfriends, wishing I had a boyfriend. Kilometers 15-20 were back on Wildwood and starting down the Maple Trail - narrow and mostly downhill at this point, and one of my favorite trails in Forest Park.
Kilometers 21-24 were along the fun, rolling parts of the Maple Trail - lots of gentle ups and downs. Years 21-24 in my life were also rolling hills, but less gently. Married at 21 to a jealous, lying man. I left him at 23 when his abuse reached a tipping point. I moved to San Francisco at 24, and learned and became who I really am. The maple trail felt easy and beautiful to explore while sorting through that. The crowd had thinned a bit, so it was a bit like being alone but not too alone here. Got passed a bit, passed some people.
Mile 15-16 (Kilometers 24-25.5), including the halfway point, was a *brutal* uphill climb from Leif Erikson up the Wiregate Trail and then up the rugged, root-laden Trillium Trail. At the intersection was an aid station. I ate a potato chip. This HARD climb was made easier by thinking about my fun life in San Francisco after my divorce. I was teaching aerobics in the financial district of the city and started working as a cigarette girl, selling concessions in nightclubs and concerts. A very different life than running uphill through a forest.
Here is one of the photos I didn't purchase from early in the race - definitely going uphill, and looks like I'm running based on arm swing, but lots of bottlenecks in these early miles.
Kilometer 26: I ran down Firelane 7 as I remembered meeting Sean shortly after my 26th birthday. Back mostly on Wildwood as I hit kilometer 29 and 32, correlating with the years I had my 2 daughters. Enjoyable years and mostly comfortable running. As I crossed the 32 kilometer mark I was starting to think about having daughter #2 Aislin, and also thinking that this was approximately the point I was pulled off the trail at Smith Rock, my friend Rachel texted me, which freaked me out a bit, as she was the friend who called me at the top of Smith Rock. She was just checking in to see how my race was going, but the timing made me jumpy. :-/
The long trek up Firelane 5 was kind of fun. I met a couple of the guys I kept leapfrogging with - one of them (Mikey) was running several 50k races this year to celebrate his 50th birthday. We got to the top of the firelane right at mile 20, and there was an excellent aid station. I stopped and drank a ton of water out of a pickle jar and ate some watermelon before heading down fabulous wide, flat, downhill Saltzman trail. I barely had time to think about my years 33-35 because the trail felt so good.
The last 15k was hard, as I would expect it to be, but I kept running for the most part. Mentally it is not as much fun to relive one's 40s as it is to think about youth, but I thought about moving to Oregon, and becoming a marathoner at almost 40, and what running has given to me. I thought about how beautifully my kids have grown up and how lucky I feel about that, even though my legs were on fire. The last grind up the Dogwood Trail from mile 28.5-29 felt a little unfair, but the long 2 mile drop back to the finish line made up for a lot of it. I felt great.
Although I wasn't sure I would even get into this race, I'd checked last year's times, and the woman who won 50-59 in 2018 did so with a 5:54, so I had that in my mind. I had a tertiary goal to win my AG, a secondary goal to win it in under 5:54, and a primary goal of winning it in 5:40-anything. I got all 3 of those goals, winning my age group in 5:49:20. I needn't have stressed. 2nd place in my group was 6:42. I got a cute glass for finishing, and another for the AG win. I filled one of them with beer and celebrated. It wasn't the experience I'd expected for my 50k/50y, but satisfying.
Here's the photo I did pay to download:
I like the little flecks of mud I'm kicking up. :-)
And here's a "foot selfie" with my winnings:
