Race Recap - North Face ECS ON 2014
I love waking up on Monday with sore legs. I really do. That feeling of having run a hard race. I love it!
I didn't get that feeling when waking up on Monday. Despite racing the North Face Endurance Challenge Series' (ECS) first appearance in Ontario on Sunday.
Nope. I almost woke up fresh. Then the day went on, and there was a delayed onset of a sore heavy feeling in my quads. There it was! All was right in the world again.
On Tuesday night they were still sore, and I don't think I was alone.
Carmy ran the relay on Saturday.
Christa ran the 21k on Sunday.
Now Alison and I had done this event in New York in May, and I couldn't wait for this crew to seek out and make a course of the toughest terrain that Ontario has to offer. That's what they do at North Face!
I was registered for the 10k again. I wanted to get a direct comparison of the differences between New York and Ontario.
It started raining heavily on the drive up, and I knew the course would be messy. Only thing that I didn't know, that it was a different kind of messy to New York.
There's me starting right behind 2nd place getter, Darren Weldrick in blue. The shirtless and bearded runner to the left was the winner, Mike Bentley. Photo credit to North Face.
It was a weird situation where it wasn’t that technical. It was super slippery.
I was hoping for a lot of mess from the rain out there, so that the elements would be similarly technical to how they were in New York. I need to remember though that in Ontario no matter how wet it gets, the mud is not deep. It can't give you that deep grip.
Ontario mud is more of a thin layer of clay, that almost feels like melted ice. The only way to run well in this is with studded shoes!
That became apparent within the first 500 metres of the race, I had already dreaded leaving my studded Jalas shoes in the car. I tried wearing the Jalas's for a minute when we got out of the car prior to starting but I wasn't feeling it. They were instantly rubbing on my heel and I haven't trained in them all year.
The Jalas FLX studded orienteering shoes, that I didn't wear but should've worn. Which are starting to show their age now because I could hardly find them on the web.
The Jalas shoes may have superior grip but they come at a cost - they've given me severe blisters every time I've worn them in a period without training in them. No matter how much vaseline I wear.
So I chose to wear my goto of trail running shoes lately, the Merrell Ascends. I love these shoes, but it breaks my heart to say they don't have what it takes for slippery terrain. Uneven terrain? Yes, they fit like a glove. But we didn't get any of the boulder covered trails, deep mud, or endless pools of water that we did in NY.
Some people might call this making excuses. I call this addressing your flaws and being open with them, so you know what to improve on next time! I've seen that this is new for some readers to get their heads around in the blogging world, but this is just how most athletes talk in my experience.
The 1st km started on a slight incline, but it was mostly contouring around the mountain.
Then it would take us up for another 2 km's. Nothing but up.
It would plateau out for the 4th, 5th, and 6th km's.
In km's 7 and 8 there was a gruelling set of uphills with moderate downhills.
Finally the main descent would start in the 9th km, and into the 10th, down a series of high stone steps.
The 10k course map. I should've take this out with me.
Not that you can't tell from the contour lines in the course map, but here's the elevation profile on it's own.
Long story short for the first 3km's, there was a lot of up! The slippery surface made it harder to get a grip. I tried to maintain a steady pace and not go into the red zone, but I was still questioning my fitness towards the end of this.
Dana Ferguson, the 1st placed female, passed me here at about 2km's. I let her go for a bit and was hoping I could catch her once I could find my rhythm on flatter terrain up top.
But that wasn't going to happen. At the 3km point it started to flatten and I tried to increase my cadence, but the sharp corners of the winding trails upset my speed a lot. My shoes now had a layer of clay on the bottom and had 0 grip. So I had to slow down and completely reset my stride coming out of every corner. I think you get what I'm going to say next, this wouldn't have been a factor if I was wearing better shoes.
Another runner caught up to me right at the top wearing a Guelph Victors shirt, Robert McRae. He would be my main tussle for most of the race. My tussle person, I always like to have a tussle person!
We would get our first taste of a downhill at about the 4th k. But it would just be a pullback into a sharp 400 metres of steep climb. This is where I started to feel that my problems went deeper than the shoes.
Once I recovered, I actually got into a nice rhythm here. The 5th and 6th km's were bliss to run in. I pulled away from McRae and concentrated my focus on pulling in Dana again.
I could see her come out of some of the corners ahead, and then finally saw how far in front she was when we came out into a clearing and ran down another hill.
Here I was thinking "could we please just start the descent already". For the 7th and 8th km's we ran up a series of short and steep hills, only catching our breaths on fast downhills. This is where I was running into trouble. McRae had caught up to me again. Gina Wong had also caught up to me here.
The first half of the course I was blaming my wrong shoe choice. But as I ran further, this shifted to blaming my lack of hill fitness. I was slowly jaunting up the remaining hills, and broke into walks on the last 2. But I still had that heavy breathing like "whaaaaah ewwwhh!". I was working hard but walking slow.
For all my talk above saying that it wasn’t that technical overall didn't mean there weren't any technical challenges at all - those came in the final mile of winding steps and people as obstacles!
It's hard to picture this without photos. The back pack of the 21k and 5k runners had all merged onto our course at this stage. Trying to run fast down a slippery mountain on a short width trail, became a matter of luck of who you had in front of you.
I found myself saying "on your left, on your right, excuse me, running fast" a lot. Whatever worked.
Somehow I pulled away from Gina here. But I was then alone, there was nobody in front of me either. So I ran the final 800 metres in the clearing as hard as I could and tried to finish striding out.
Crossing the finish line. Photo courtesy of ultraracephotos.com
I was instantly disappointed.
With my lack of hill fitness. With my bad shoe choice. With my lack of tapering coming into the race.
I didn't really care what I came and just wrote off the race as not my best.
Looking back into the crowd at the start, and after the race to the right.
I had fun though, this is the kind of event I want to see more of in Ontario! It was a perfect course, and even that cluster of people at the end just added to the challenge.
So it wasn't until a couple of hours after the race with a beer in my stomach that I bothered to look at the results. One of the guys I've met through Twitter, Andrew Chak, told me I came 1st in my age group and 7th overall. That was a surprise!
Post race atmosphere by the lake, and celebrating on the podium with Alison.
It was easy to feel down about not being able to run well up the hills or on the clay. But I have to keep things in perspective - although I'm passionate about this race, this is a base building year for me. I wasn't the fittest that I've been, but it was never going to be the case.
I will be building for this next year though. This race will be a main focus on my calendar.
