New season, new goal

Like many an athlete I found a race that sounded good last spring. Beautiful location: the Sierra Nevadas in August, challenging: three days of trail running between 22-24 miles a day, doable: they promised a roving camp and three meals a day, with hot showers at the end of the day. I prodded, cajoled and all but begged three close friends to sign up as well and somewhat surprisingly, they did. We followed our own training plans but tried to do our long distance runs together on the weekend, with the goal being to get the miles in on new trails rather than the same trails we run every week. A couple of us even headed to Tahoe to do a self-imposed ‘high altitude training camp’ weekend, where three days of back to back running left of feeling as confident as possible with the race on the horizon.

Then fire season hit, and as we all know, hit early. We watched as trails we’ve hiked went up in flames in Big Sur, and trails we’ve run barely escaped scorching in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We debated the effect of smoke on our lungs as we ran with ash raining from the sky, but run we did. We ran the bluff overlooking the coastline at Wilder State Park, the Skyline to Sea trail from the mountains down to the ocean in Big Basin State Park, the mountain ridges in Nicene Marks State Park, past lime kilns and old homesteads in Fall Creek State Park, on dusty hot hills in Almaden Quicksilver and through misty fog over the rolling hills of Skyline Ridge with Silicon valley below.

Then we got the email notification saying that the race had been cancelled. They had not seen the sky for three weeks in the Sierras due to smoke cover and other races, notably the Western States 100 as well as an endurance mountain bike race, had been cancelled as well. Immediate relief mixed with melancholy settled in. One unexpected pregnancy and one bulged disc had surprised us all in the past few weeks and left our team of four a shaky team of three, but even with those surprises our sights were still set on completing the race…even if it meant more hiking than running.

The race refund came back this week, as well as confirmation that I’d made the newly formed Santa Cruz Endurance Team headed up by Martin Spierings (‘Ironman Goes Ultra’, July/August 2008) and sponsored by Central Coast Running. While the upcoming Silicon Valley ½ marathon race we will run is no three-day race in the Sierra Nevadas it does offer the chance of a new goal to pursue and the reasonable excuse to run new trails. In the end it’s the miles on these accessible and unbelievably close trails with varied terrain that makes the racing worth it. With our State Park system in jeopardy the reason to get out and enjoy these local treasures is even more pressing. So pick a park or a goal to hit this fall and enjoy the journey—even as it changes, which it most likely will.