Redwoods Ho!

Sunday mornings are typically reserved for sleeping in, reading the paper, filling up the kids with sugar laden breakfast cereal, and/or annoying your neighbors with the cacophony of your lawn mower. Triathletes and runners are different. Sleeping in is sleeping until 6AM, our kids get their best quality sleep and do their dining in the back seat of the car on the way to a race or in the jog stroller, and our lawns are usually overgrown.

This past Sunday, my friend Liesbeth Brouwer and I hit the road at the butt crack of dawn to drive to Felton for the annual Race thru the Redwoods 10K. Yes, I know, we violated the strict race distance to distance to race ratio rule, but the Redwood run promised high schwag potential and a post race pancake breakfast. We felt if we walked away with a podium finish, a t-shirt, and at least 3 pancakes, the one hour drive was justified.

The city of Felton, home of the Roaring Camp Railroad and more redwood trees than people, hosted the annual 10K. Literally 10’s of people drive from locales as distant as Santa Cruz and Boulder Creek (5 miles away) to compete in this epic event. The course features a flat and fast paved first mile, then dumps the competitors onto dusty single track followed by a monster hill at mile 2.5. I was able to hang on by the skin of my teeth behind Liesbeth for the first 2 miles while she clocked a 6:25 and 6:30. She told me afterwards that she felt her start was a bit on the slow side, while I felt like the wheels were going to fly off at any moment.

We hit the monster hill and queued up for the slog skyward. I took the opportunity offered by the drop in pace to begin breathing normally again and bolting the wheels back on. I noticed Liesbeth was walking up ahead of me, but despite doing what I thought qualified as running, she continued to gap me. Since I had run this race once previously, I had tried to describe the course to Liesbeth, although I failed to “remember” the monster hill had at least two false summits. When we hit the second false summit, Liesbeth backed off a bit to recover and prepare for the long downhill to the finish. I charged by. When the last steep pitch of the hill appeared around the corner, Liesbeth was in downhill mode while I was still in uphill mode.

Once I cleared the hill, I tried to get my legs to turn-over, but they refused. I stumbled through the next few miles, and then finally found the rhythm at mile 5. I kept looking up ahead to see if any other 40 year old runners were within road kill range, but only saw infants and toddlers.

I finished just in front of the 3rd place female, slightly mitigating the damage to my fragile male ego. Liesbeth was hot on my heels and would have caught and passed me if I had not employed the “shuffle the feet and create lots of dust clouds” tactic in the last mile. She pulled out a 1st place AG and 4th place OA while I managed a 3rd AG.

As we waited for our podium schwag, we both won raffle prizes of $50 cash each. We picked up our medals then headed over for the post-race nosh. The Felton Volunteer Fire Department served us an excellent pancake, sausage, and omelet breakfast. While dining, I noticed there was plentiful fireman eye-candy for Liesbeth in addition to the pancakes, but I had to be satisfied with a second serving of sausage. Good times.