Hallucination 6 Hour Race

This past weekend, Kendra and I headed over to Charleston, SC ostensibly for me to run a six hour race. For those of you wise enough to not know what this is, a six hour race is exactly what it sounds. Running for six hours. In this case around a lake on a 2.3ish mile flat jeep road. I planned to use this race to force me to get a long run in as I have not had great success doing that on my own with all the traveling we've been doing lately.

I had no idea how to pace for this time because if you run harder you still have to keep going. So I settled into 7:30's with another guy who just moved down to Charleston from outside of Boston. As I always discover, the world really is quite small with us having shared acquaintances. We settled in to chit chatting and ran stride for stride for the first 90 minutes or so. At that point Kenny joined us for a lap(pacers were allowed at any point). The three of us ran another two laps or two and then we split up just to give ourselves some space thinking we'd see each other again over the remaining four hours.

Soon thereafter, probably around the time I was running backwards talking to Kenny, I strained my hip flexor(which I had previously irritated at the Charlotte half marathon a few weeks ago). This was around mile 22-23. Kenny and I slowed it down a little but for fear that I would make it work we soon settled into a walk. A lap like that really put us off pace but then we decided to make a game of it but doing lunges or short sprints interspersed with walking. It got us moving a bit faster without irritating my hip. When I hit the 30 mile mark in 4:15, I decided I had had enough and we decided that a 255 minute race would suffice and any longer was just asking for doing myself a disservice from a training standpoint.

After a brief discussion with Lazarus, the notorious race director of the equally notorious Barkley Marathon, about Nashua women's basketball in the 1980's no less(I was racing in my Gate City Striders singlet), Kenny and I headed to Charleston where we had a great race of our day exploring a few breweries, a brief stop at an Oyster festival in Mount Pleasant and then a great dinner.

We awoke the next morning and both felt good enough to do a short shake out run over the Charleston bridge and then headed back to Columbia in time for the amazing Superbowl.

 Which Kenny slept through. But what an amazing game!

And another fun week.

This weekend we're headed out to Nashville with my brother Andrew so no long runs but Andrew did tell me that he found a food eating challenge out there I may have to accept:)


Until next time,

Danny