I haven’t gotten around to posting my experience from this race. It was an amazing race and made me realize how much I adore trail racing. It also made me realize that maybe asphalt racing might be a thing of the past.
We dropped the kids with our sitter and drove down to Malibu on the 101. We had just gotten back from backpacking in Potrero John (Ojai area) the day before. We were pretty tired!
When we got to the start, the race direction told us that there was in fact a creek crossing early in the race. There was an alternative route that we could use if we wanted. The creek was thigh deep and in my mind I was thinking that I hadn’t gotten my feet wet before so I don’t know how well my shoes dry. Uh oh.
The first few miles were really nice but really crowded. We got to the creek crossing and I thought about the detour for a second and then realized that it was part of the adventure and I just HAD to go over the creek. Since we had been backpacking and crossing multiple creeks….I just jumped right through the water as all the men around me tip toed through. In retrospect it probably wasn’t the safest way to go through because of how slippery and rocky it was.
We sloshed up the first of the many long hills in this race. There were many many hills, lol. In fact, most of the first half was one long steep hill! Right before the aide station at about 7.5 miles was a peak that was just beautiful with rock formations and little caves.
After the aide station we had a few more hills and embarked on 4 (at least) miles of DOWN HILL. It was beautiful and the crowd had really thinned out by then so I was running down almost completely by myself. At the bottom we ran next to a creek for a while then out onto the pavement with about a hundred tourists doing day hikes. I had no idea how many miles were left. Finally we saw our friends who had taken the trip to meet us at the finish-yay! It was a fantastic race! I am looking forward to Pacifica 21K and Montana De Oro 25K this summer!
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