LOCATION: Lake Youngs, Renton, Washington
I had met Van Phan aka "Pigtails" many times, she is a very nice person and so when I noticed that she was putting together a 50k in January of 2008, I decided to make the trip. In December of
2007, I decided to go ahead and train for the Pacific Rim 24 hour race, so after doing a few long training runs in Nov, Dec and Jan, I decided to do an extended double.I talked with my friend Tim and he decided to join me. We drove up on Friday night and stayed the night at a hostel in Seattle. We drove to Lake Youngs in Renton, Washington for the race, early on Saturday. When we arrived it was still dark and very cold! It was 26 degrees.
We started off and were running good. The race is three loops and then a little out-and-back. It was cold and the ground was frozen solid. It was not a technical trail, but the frozen ground made it a trick to run on. Tim and I ran pretty goo the first loop; we ended up running the 9.6 miles in 1:29:26.
In the second loop we kept pushing along. It remained dry and felt great. We did slow down, but managed to run a 1:38:27 in this loop. As we got to the start area, it was starting to rain. I didn't think much about it, but boy did we get hit by it.
As we started out on the third loop, I knew it would be tough. We were walking up the hills and running the rest. It was good. But the rain fell on the frozen ground, this caused for some very slick conditions. At one point I did slip on the frozen ground and got a bit scratched. We slowed down and ran the final loop in 1:38:24.
We finished the run off with a challenging out-and-back. At the end we had run a time of 5:08:01. We drove back to Seattle where we spent the night at the hostel.
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