Brazos Bend 50-miler

I've been negligent in keeping up with this blog lately. I have had several great races since last August and some tough ones too. Yesterday's race was a fun one and I actually took the time to stop for some photos so I figure it's a good opportunity to document another race.

The Brazos Bend 50 mile trail run is a first-year event put on by Rob Goyen of the Houston Area Trail Runners. They are a group I get along well with and I could tell in the months leading up to this race, that Rob was preparing for a quality event so I wanted in. The race takes place at Brazos Bend State Park, which is about 45 minutes southwest of where I live. the state park is a swampy wildlife refuge and it is known primarily for the alligators that you are all but guaranteed to see if the weather is warm. Well let me tell you the weather was warm and the gators were out in numbers. I have run an unrelated 50k out there a few years ago so I knew most of the park trails pretty well.

I woke up at 4AM on race morning after going to bed early, got dressed, grabbed my gear, and hit the road for the 45 minute drive. My race started at 6AM and there was also a 50k, 25k, and 10k race that started an hour later. I got to the park with 45 minutes to spare and I got a great parking spot. I set up my drop bag and a chair and then I caught up with some friends while we waited for 6AM to arrive. Rob runs a tight ship and the race went off promptly at 6:00 with a 10 second countdown to the race. The horn went off and we all went shuffling off into the darkness.

The trails at BB are forgiving and the course is very very flat. It's a great race for a road runner to make the jump to an ultra and for trail runners to set some new time records for themselves. I didn't feel like my fitness was fully up to a 50-mile PR, so I had decided to start in the back of the pack and just kind of go with the flow and see how I felt. I didn't have a time goal, but I would have been happy with a 10:xx hour range for a finish. I don't think I glanced much at my pace for the first five miles or so. I just ran by feel. This is a good thing and it can also be a bad thing since my excitement sometimes gets the better of me. But I didn't see the harm since I had no agenda for the race. If I burned myself out, I'd just walk in the last of it. The 14 hour time cutoff was certainly generous enough for me to do that if needed.

The sun came up around 6:45 and the sky was overcast with a cool but humid mist drifting out of the swampy woods. The best description for the park I can think of is to imagine movies or shows that take place in the Louisiana swamp. There are lots of oak trees with Spanish moss hanging down. The trail itself was completely dry, but we ran along swampy lakes with lily pads and green algae on the surface. Bullfrogs croaked and cranes called out in the early dawn light as we ran silently by. There were some conversations, but most people seemed content to take in the natural beauty of the environment and set the pace for the long day ahead.

The first loop was fairly uneventful. The weather was comfortable. The aid stations were well-stocked, and I kept to my routine of taking a salt pill every hour and an Amrita bar as well. I drank a lot of Gatorade to keep hydrated since the humidity made me sweat so much. My clothes were soaked and dripping within two hours. Not a lot of big wildlife was out and visible in the morning since it was so overcast and the alligators tend to come out with the sun. There were a lot of birds, especially long-legged cranes stepping through the marsh looking for breakfast.

I fell into a fast but comfortable pace and struck up a conversation with a lady from the UK named Rosemary who had just moved to down from the UAE. We chatted about cultural differences and various races we had done. She is training for a 100-miler in England in June and it was in this conversation that I came to learn that giving out belt buckles for 100 mile finishes is apparently an American thing. I had no idea, but I suppose it makes sense.

1st gator of the day. You can kind of sort of see it in the water.

The first loop finished and the second loop started. I dropped off my headlamp and traded out to my cowboy hat, which has become a staple of my running gear. It makes people smile, it gets comments, it keeps the sun off my head better than a baseball cap, and it's extremely comfortable. The straw hat is ventilated and the elastic band doesn't irritate me even when I sweat. My pace for the first loop was under ten minutes per mile, which was much faster than I planned to run. The thing about it was that I felt great and I knew that I was willing to drop down in speed as soon as I felt I was working too hard.

The second loop was still overcast, but day had broken and some of the wildlife was out. Several people were almost giddy about seeing an alligator on the course so the first one we came across caused several runners to stop for photos. I didn't worry about it because he was too far away for a good photo and I knew there would be dozens more before the day was done. About midway through the second loop, the clouds started misting on us. Not rain, but just a gentle mist and a cool breeze. This kind of thing never happens during my races. It was almost too good to be true. Needless to say, all of the racers loved it and we carried right on running in high spirits.

Around the 4th hour is when I made my first mistake of the day and I knew I was making it, but I did it anyway. I'd had three of the Amrita bars already, but I had not been supplementing it with different flavors and because of that, I started getting tired of the sweet pineapple chia flavor. I can get away with this for a while, but I also had not been drinking Gatorade and had been refilling my bottle with water instead. That meant I wasn't getting any calories at all and that's bad news. So I had a bar on the third hour and skipped the fourth hour (although I did stay on top of my salt pills throughout the day) and kept on running hard with Rosemary. Something had to give and of course it did. We made it through 30 miles in under five hours and I felt like I was working pretty hard for a guy with 20 miles left to run so I sent her on ahead and dropped off my pace. Within a few minutes, I realized I was bonking, or hitting the wall. Whatever you like to call it, that's what was happening. I also knew how to fix it, but I wasn't too excited about it. I took a walk break for a few minutes while I force-fed myself another Amrita bar and washed it down with water. I love those bars, but I was overdoing it with them and it wasn't much fun. The trick worked and within five minutes or so, I could feel the sugar in my system and the energy coming back to my legs. I was done with sub-10:00 miles for the day, though. I trotted along at 11:30 pace or so, which is still quite fast under the circumstances.

A little later, as I was running by one of the swamps, I saw some non-racing visitors stopped by the shore looking into the water so I stopped to check it out. There was an 8-foot alligator two feet out from the shore rolling lazily in the water. It looked like he was playing. He would stick his head up, then roll over slowly and look over at us again. This shot was too good to pass up so I snapped a photo.

They see me rollin' - They hatin'

You'd think such a big lizard so close by might give you pause, but it all seemed so natural. We came to an agreement that if I stayed out of his domain, he would stay in it and that seemed to work fine for both of us. I found out later that part of the race was briefly interrupted when a gator crossed the race course and lounged on the trail while the runners had to stand around frowning at their watches and the alligator didn't give a damn. Maybe he was just letting everyone know whose house it was.

I trotted my way through the rest of the second loop and found several friends waiting for me at the finish line, only I wasn't finished. I swapped out a few more supplies, exchanged some high fives and off I went for my third and final loop. I was feeling the fatigue and the hard-run miles of the morning and that's when the sun decided to come out and it got HOT. With the sun and the heat came the reptiles. The first one I saw was a fat cottonmouth moving across the trail like a thick wavy black stripe. I tried to get close enough for a good photo, but he slithered off into the grass and I wasn't about to go in after him. But not to worry, it wasn't long before I came across this beauty right on the side of the trail and he happily posed for my photo.

He may have found it fun to be lazy, but I had work to do and the miles on the third loop were going by so slowly that I felt like I was going to be out there all day. I shuffled into one of the aid stations and they asked me what I needed. I said, "I need some calories, but I don't want to eat anything." The girl at the station knew exactly what I meant so she made my choices for me. She handed me a little cup of pickles. "You'll eat this," and I did. Then she handed me a small tin of Pringles. "And also this," and I did. Then while a volunteer was filling up my bottle with Gatorade, she dropped a quarter of a PB&J sandwich in the tin and told me to eat that too. And I did. Pickles, Pringles, and PB&J. What the hell!? But it did the trick of course just like she knew it would and off I went feeling better than when I arrived.

My travel and running buddy Chris was out there on his mountain bike cruising along the course greeting several people he knew and I must have run into him five times along the race. It was always fun to see a friendly face when you are exhausted. I took a moment at a station and slowly grazed while I stretched my lower back. Come to think of it, I did a lot of standing around during this race between the various aid station stops and stopping for photos. I probably spent close to ten minutes not moving, which isn't really a good thing.

With about ten miles to go, I ran across this kid and we fell in together to chat. Well, he wasn't exactly a kid, but he looked to be in his early/mid 20s and he was running with nothing more than a water bottle full of Gatorade. I don't understand it, but apparently it worked for him. he really helped carry me by talking and my pace fell back into low 11 minute pace, which made the miles tick by much faster. As we got to about mile 44, I developed this system where we would run until I hit the next mile alert on my watch and then we would walk for a minute while I drank as much as I could and ate something. Then off we went to run to the next mile alert. This ended up being a really great system for me and he seemed content to hang out while I was doing it.

45, 46, the last aid station, 47, 48, 49 and soon we could see the finish line and, as always, finish line magic kicks in and you never feel tired once the line is within sight. We ran across and I stopped my Garmin. Despite stopping for about ten minutes in total, and despite the brutal heat and humidity that the winter had made all of us forget, I somehow managed to take 18 minutes off my previous 50 mile personal best and come across at 9:19:05. Not too shabby for a race I wasn't going to work hard at. The flat course was certainly a benefit to me, but I maintain that this was the toughest 50-miler I've run to date.

There were some other pictures I stopped to take along the way to really appreciate the atmosphere and wildlife of the park. It's a beautiful park and a great place for running. Rob puts on a top-class event and I'm already signed up to come back in December for their 100-miler. It should be a lot of fun and this is a great candidate for me going sub-24 on a 100-miler. That's a long way away though, so I'll tell that story after it happens.