Happy New Year!!

I was thinking about a little year-in-review post but thought to myself “what have I done?”  Well, I can tell you, not as much as I would have liked to on the running front.  This year did not play out as I would have hoped, but there were some personal highlights that I sort of forgot about. I ran Psycho Wyco 50k for the 2nd year in a row and knocked about 20 minutes off of my previous years run.  I love this race.  Its a tough course and being in February in the Midwest the weather could be almost anything.  This year there was snow then rising temps caused the snow to melt and it was a sloppy mess.  Ben Holmes is a great RD and I always look forward to this event… and the black bean soup.  I’ll be signing up for it again this year.

My main goal was to run a 100 miler and that did not happen.  I DNF’d 50 miles into McNaughton 100 in April with a foot/ankle injury that kept me out of running shoes until mid June.  I bit off more than I could chew.  I felt good going into the race, but having my new daughter took an unforeseen toll on my training.  I fit it in when I could, but never got my mileage to where it needed to be and think ultimately that led to my injuries.  This race still sticks with me and I’m going at it again this year.  It’s going to take an army to get me off of that course before I knock down 10 laps at 10 miles a piece this year.

In August I decided to get back on the horse with the long distance stuff and signed up for the Howl at the Moon 8 Hour run.  It was a great event and even though I showed up way undertrained, I was able to complete 45.25 miles.  I was super excited that I had not lost too much in my time off.

I figured that since Howl went well that I would try to run a 50k before the season was over to get in another race.  I picked the Dogwood Canyon 50k in Branson, MO.  I knew the race would have a lot of hills and thought it would be good to get in some hill training so I threw my name in the hat.  I ended up running my best “50k” to date.  I used quotes because the course was a little short, but  I added an extra bonus mile getting lost and would have finished under 6 hours even with another mile.  This course was a bear.  Roughly 10-11 climbs all around 400 feet each and all steep.  Again a great feeling to finish it as well as I did.  It let me know I could sustain a faster pace over rougher terrain and that overall I was getting stronger.

That was it for official races for 2008.  I capped it all off with a 40 miles and ~8000 feet of climb fun run with my fellow SLUGS.  So, I guess all-in-all not a bad year.  Not exactly as I had planned, but  I had fun, I met more great people and I continue to get stronger, it’s hard to complain about that.

To all you out there, Happy New Year and I look forward to reading about your adventures in 2009 and hopefully meeting some more of you along the way.

Cheers!