On Saturday, March 14th I ran 50 miles on the same course as the Heartland 100 that I finished in October 08. I took one day off in between the two weeks of Extreme Camp Makeover to run. The run was the Kansas Ultrarunners Society's annual Members Only fun run for 2009.
Now that I am very familiar with the course, I knew what to expect and those hills with about 10 miles to go to the end in Cassody just seem to get steeper and steeper every time! Otherwise it was a great day to run and a lot of fun. My legs actually started out sore before I even started because I was working all day every day at camp of that week leading up to the run. The weather was chilly at the 7am start - lower 30s. There wasn't much wind all day really, and it quickly heated up to the mid 70s by afternoon. By the mid to late afternoon it was hot! Because there were just a few of us running this unofficial race, the roving aid stations were more frequent than the actual race. 2 guys from Wichita, Dennis and Terry, who are also Kansas Ultrarunners Society members, of course, since it's members only, and I ran the whole 50 miles together from start to finish! Allen Smelser also finish about 50 minutes behind me. He caught up about mile 22 and then faded back away.
My finishing time was 11 hours, 15 minutes and 6 seconds. That's almost exactly 2 hours better than my previous 50 mile personal record last year. So I was very happy with that improvement. This Saturday is the Rockin K 50 mile trail run. The weekend will be so much fun and I am looking forward to it greatly. If the conditions are right (no mud, no rain), I'm really going to try to push to break 11 hours - but there's no way to know how it will turn out. Right now the forecast is for rain and thunderstorms all day.
