Jackpot USATF 100
February 16, 2024
28:52:02
67th 100 miler or more
9 OA female
2nd in 60-64 AG
Fun smiles in the sun for the win!
Sometimes the best part of a hundred miler is who you travel with and in this case it was. Sue and I just travel well together with a lot of serious conversations and far too much giggling. And then there was quite a gang from the Seattle area attending Jackpot so we got to support each other while racking up the loops. Thanks, Amy, Stefanie, and Dee for your cheerfulness on the course.
Fortunately we had great weather with mid 60s for the high and mid 40s for the low. A cool breeze during the day helped while at night the cool breeze made me put on a lot of clothes. I had just barely got over a cold so I wasn’t sure how well I would do but was hoping for a good run. Alas I was slower than I wanted to be but got er done.
Felt great for the first 50, especially liked running and smiling from 40-50 miles. Used mostly liquid calories for the first 50 with an occasional potato or gel. Then I treated myself to cup o noodles at 50 miles. It just goes down so easy. Kind of slowed but kept racking up the loops. I think miles 40-50 felt so good as the sun set and it was a bit cooler. Through the night my hamstring was not fun, it just ached any time I wanted to go faster so slow is what we did. I did find it odd that my pinkie toes, who always give me issues, started early on. So I cut holes in my shoes at 36 miles. This is significantly earlier than usual. It helped and then I didn’t realize I had a blister on one pinkie toe until I finished and it was a biggie, almost as big as another toe. People took pictures of it because they were so impressed.
Sue helped me a great deal. She ran and got 50 miles and then of all things went back to our Air BnB and slept. The next morning she comes back to the race course all fresh after sleeping and showering and having coffee. She walks the last 10-12 miles with me as I make my usual sounds, people who know, know. She gets a Starbucks breakfast sandwich for me and then regales me with lots of stories to keep my mind off the ouchies. What a gal. Thank you my friend. Tee hee hee.
As usual Aravaipa feeds us well and sets up a great race. There were some issues with timing and they got fixed. I had a conversation with Jamil about the frustration of runners when the timing and lap counting is not correct. He acknowledged that his team is working on this since they are now doing it without Mike Melton. I think the biggest issue for me is not seeing my name after each loop. Sometimes this new timing system gets overwhelmed with the shear quantity of runners so that it doesn’t show your name on the screen, but every time I checked the live feed, sure enough my lap was counted. So I’m going to relax about this and just run and have fun in the future at Aravaipa races.
The biggest age group in the USATF race this year were the 80-84 year old men. I got a kick out of encouraging them and they gave me just as much shit as I gave them. They have had a lot of practice with joking around in races like this and it showed. Made me giggle a lot and hope that I can be out on the loop when I reach my 80s.
Congrats to my friends for doing so awesome, Stefanie, Amy, Dee and Sue. Congrats to Vinny and Jaide on your huge PRs. Congrats to Ricky, Tony, Diane, Yen, Claudia, and Kim, your smiles and positive attitude helped a lot.
We do a lot of smiling on these loopy races and smiles make us happy to get more loops. I learned a new fact from Peter. The word smiles is the longest word. Why you ask? Well there is a mile between the esses. S mile S.
Tee hee hee.