Lululemon dropped her. Facebook isn't letting me copy the link.

Not surprised. A huge point of the Lululemon further project was women lifting up other women in running/ultras. This petty editing Wikipedia is the opposite of that.

I'm sure she will keep running, but this could easily "end" her career.

quick recap of BFC. There will be a longer form coming at some point.

First mountain ultra is officially in the books! Ran (well, "ran") the 55k at the Crested Butte Ultra on Saturday.

Overall it was a great experience and went about as well as I'd hoped. Scenery was top notch with the aspens peaking and the course itself was fun. The main climb up over 11k ft was brutal, but I was able to recover on the decent and keep moving for the next 12 miles alternating running & hiking.

My feet were not prepared to be wet for 6 hours. First water crossing was around mile 11 and after that they kept coming just regularly enough that I wouldn't dry off fully in between. Other than run faster I don't think there was much to do about it unless you wanted to change socks/shoes a dozen times.

nice work! I saw some video from the race, the foliage looked AWESOME.

Sounds like a blast! Well done!

Stage #1 of the Kathmandu Valley Rim series starts this weekend. ~30k with ~5k of vert. Was scheduled for last weekend but flooding that killed a couple hundred justified a postponement. It's been pretty sunny these last few days so hoping it's not still completely mud.

Series is 5 stages, each about 30-35k once a month but on the weekend of the final stage they'll also hold 100 miler of all 5 stages around the rim. I can't manage that yet but looking forward to chipping away one stage each month.

Paced about 50 miles at Arkansas Traveler this weekend. Overall it went pretty well and my runner finished. We finished back of the pack but there were only 94 finishers out of 250 registered runners. Someone at an aid station said there were about 17 DNS. People were dropping like flies. We saw people dropping from the 50k aid station on. The winner finished in 15 hours and some change a good two and a half hours ahead of the next guy. The last person finished with about 11 minutes to spare. A few people timed out from what we heard.

It was my runners first 100 and he stayed in pretty good spirits for almost the entire race. It got pretty hot on Saturday but cooled off overnight. I thought about signing up or this race, but overall glad I didn't. It's almost all dirt and jeep roads and the terrain was kind of boring. The aid stations were pretty good and we got into a groove and found some strategies that were working. We stayed pretty strong until about mile 85 when the wheels started falling off. We were still making pretty good forward progress and I told my runner that was pretty good for his first. His kids ran it in with him and he finished at 28:45.

Little sore since I hadn't trained much for big climbs lately, but I should be good to go in a few days. I tried out injinji socks and they worked pretty well. I still had a hot spot on my little toe, and nothing I've tried has helped, so I'm guess I'm back to the drawing board on that.

psuedo quick video on my AC100 DNF if anyone is interested:

RustyBoltz said:

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Got talked into filling a last minute opening on some friends' Ragnar team for the Oct event at Flat Rock Ranch.
Maybe I'm underestimating the mileage, but it seems the hardest part is going to be not drinking too much between loops while waiting on the rest of the team to run their loops.

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If you see a tall goofy looking dude in a blue tank top that says "Rip n Run" on the front and "Hobbles" on the back- come over and say howdy!

First Ragnar where I didn't have to run extra legs or wasn't recovering from surgery.

It's soooo much more fun doing it this way!

It was a fun experience but I don't know if our group are quite ready to drink the koolaid.
I had some good runs, especially considering coming off IMWaco70.3 5 days earlier, but I certainly benefited from the 8hours I had between loops since the rest of my group were avg 12-15min/mi.

aggiespartan said:

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Paced about 50 miles at Arkansas Traveler this weekend. Overall it went pretty well and my runner finished. We finished back of the pack but there were only 94 finishers out of 250 registered runners. Someone at an aid station said there were about 17 DNS. People were dropping like flies. We saw people dropping from the 50k aid station on. The winner finished in 15 hours and some change a good two and a half hours ahead of the next guy. The last person finished with about 11 minutes to spare. A few people timed out from what we heard.

It was my runners first 100 and he stayed in pretty good spirits for almost the entire race. It got pretty hot on Saturday but cooled off overnight. I thought about signing up or this race, but overall glad I didn't. It's almost all dirt and jeep roads and the terrain was kind of boring. The aid stations were pretty good and we got into a groove and found some strategies that were working. We stayed pretty strong until about mile 85 when the wheels started falling off. We were still making pretty good forward progress and I told my runner that was pretty good for his first. His kids ran it in with him and he finished at 28:45.

Little sore since I hadn't trained much for big climbs lately, but I should be good to go in a few days. I tried out injinji socks and they worked pretty well. I still had a hot spot on my little toe, and nothing I've tried has helped, so I'm guess I'm back to the drawing board on that.

They need to move this race back about two weeks to mid oct or late october. The last five years have been very warm for the race start which whittles the field down as the race goes on.

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They need to move this race back about two weeks to mid or late oct. The last five years have been very warm for the race start which whittles the field down as the race goes on.

one of the dumber things we've done, but still makes me laugh.

did you run into anyone else on the trail while you were doing this?

unfortunately, no. we were hoping to get some reactions. There was one mountain biker when we first got there, but we hadn't eve started setting up.

That was entertaining.

Between drinking pumpkin beer & having to smell pumpkin for the mile ... barf

Javelina is on Saturday. Not really sure how I'm feeling about it. What I'm about to do never really hits me until packet pickup. This week I'm trying to get myself rested up and think about some mental strategies. I'm going to need them since I feel like I could be better prepared, but I always feel that way. The temperatures were trending down, but it looks like it's going back up. It's going to be hot.

johnson2012 said:

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That was entertaining.

Between drinking pumpkin beer & having to smell pumpkin for the mile ... barf

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honestly, i don't even remember smelling the pumpkin.

the worst part for me was the pumpkincino beer. Not only do I not like pumpkin beers, but I also don't like coffee (yeah, i know, i'm weird). So having to chug a pumpkin coffee stout ruined me. I was actually running pretty close until that one. I'm just lucky that my wife tolerates this stupid stuff and is our post-beer mile DD.

We've got another beer mile that will be out soon as well. And one that we shot that's almost a year old that we'll eventually get edited. But will be getting to some other content soon.

aggiespartan said:

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Javelina is on Saturday. Not really sure how I'm feeling about it. What I'm about to do never really hits me until packet pickup. This week I'm trying to get myself rested up and think about some mental strategies. I'm going to need them since I feel like I could be better prepared, but I always feel that way. The temperatures were trending down, but it looks like it's going back up. It's going to be hot.

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completely forgot you were doing this one! I'm excited to hear about how it goes. I've never heard a bad thing about this race. Only thing I'm not a fan of is that is multi-lap.

Good luck!

My son and I ran the Palo Duro Canyon Trail Run (25K) this past weekend, and it was fantastic. We ended up finishing in a little over 3 hours, just having a fun father/son time. It was really well organized and we plan to do it again. The plan was for a fun father/son day and for me to see if I'm ready to run Dinosaur Valley 25K in November.

The only thing that drove me nuts about the event was the number of participants who were using their studio over-the-ear headphones and running with their faces glued to their phones while running.

Or maybe I'm just bitter because I tripped and fell hard despite NOT having any kind of electronic distractions haha.

aggiespartan said:

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Me either but I'll see how it goes. My first Aravaipa race too!

I'll be bib 359.

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good luck sparty

I was just listening to the javelina preview singletrack podcast, and they didn't mention your name at all. Not even dark horse. Wtf?



What's your cooling strategy? Mid 90s with 100% exposure is rough.

I know it was weird. I should send someone a stern DM.

I'm going to wear a sun shirt and have an ice bandana. I'm going to wear a hat but my sun shirt has a hood too. I've never ran in dry heat so I might have to adjust on the fly. I'll slow down after the sun comes up and try to make sure I'm able to run at night.

Almost time

crush it!

Good luck!

Thinking of doing the Bandera 50k in January, which would be my first ultra. I have been training for it, but waiting for at least another month to make sure training goes well.

Question would be are poles recommended or not really needed?

I see the 3000' gain, but that doesn't seem like much over 30miles and at such low elevation. But not familiar with the course so, not sure. Guessing most people don't use them.

Any tips and recs are appreciated. Again, hoping to do it, but we will see how training goes. I was signed up for the rocky 50k last year and pulled a calf 2 weeks out playing pickleball. :\

I vote no poles. I've run the 100k 4 times and the 50k once.

Congrats! Hell of a job in that heat.

I might be doing Bandera 50k now. Probably decide by tomorrow. I have to figure out if I can get trail shoes in time. Problem is, it's too late to try a new version and can't find the old ones that will ship in time.

How much time do you need with a new version? You've got a couple of months.

Javelina is kind of chaos from the very beginning. If you want a crew tent along the start/finish shute, you have to have someone there on Thursday to reserve your spot. We hooked up with some local people, so luckily they were able to get there in time for the reservation and get us a really good spot pretty close to the start/finish.

There are a lot of people that run this race. There are 2 time slots for the 100M - 6 and 6:30. They recommend 6 for sub 24 and 6:30 for everyone else. A lot of people picked 6 just to avoid more daylight. I started at 6, but given my bout with the flu a bit ago, I knew I didn't have a chance getting close to 24 anymore. My fitness still hasn't really come back. My official time was 28:56:02, which was a PR from Badger on a much tougher course.

It's hot out there. When we started, there was a big congo line for quite a while. It really warmed up by 10am. It took a long time for the crowd to thin out, but there was constant traffic. When the leaders ran by, they had the bike camera man and everything which was even more chaos. It was fun, but my right foot start hurting from being at an angle on the side of the course getting out of the way for the fast people on the single track. There were places where the trail opened up a bit, but a lot of those places had cactus on the side and I was very careful not to fall on the rocks and into the cactus. One guy fell and got a cholla to the face.

The temperature got up to 97 or 98. There was no shade. I saw 2 people laid out on the side of the trail. The medical tents were full until I got to the 4th or 5th lap. One guy was airlifted for diminished kidney function. It seemed like a lot of people went out hot and didn't adjust. I also talked to a lot of people that this was their first 100 or their x attempt at a hundred. The course is constant rollers, no shade, and a 30 hour cutoff. I wouldn't really call it beginner friendly unless you really have a dialed in plan. There were plenty of experienced runners that dropped. I think it ended up being about 50% drop rate, which I thought was much lower than it was going to be. If someone wants a beginner long distance race with the same atmosphere, the 100k has a 29 hour cutoff.

The volunteers were all great and very friendly, but the aid stations were always full. When I've run some smaller races, the volunteers are over you trying to help. They just couldn't do that because of the number of people. I didn't try much of their hot food, but they had all of the regular fare. Their potatoes were cold and kind of hard. They had a rice and broth, which was really good the first time I had it. The second time, it just wasn't doing it for me, but that could have totally been me.

Overall it was a fun experience but you should know that you're getting into a big race with a lot of people and a lot of traffic. It's fun seeing people, and it would have been a lot better if I could have finished before the sun came up again. The heat really hit on Sunday too. It was a death march for everyone left out on the course. It went down into the 70s at night, and there were pockets of cool air, but there were also spots with dead air that were hot, so it didn't feel like there was much of a reprieve other than not dealing with the sun. The crowd did thin out quite a bit though, so I did get to enjoy some miles alone until I hooked up with 2 others to help push each other to the finish. Everyone was pretty friendly even though it was rough.

Edit to add: I didn't have a pacer but it would have been nice to have someone to navigate the aid stations for me while I dealt with other things.