Big Cottonwood Marathon

This summer has been another summer of marathon training.  Lots of early Sunday mornings sweating it out for a few hours.  But this year I had company!  It was so much fun training with Brynn and we put our training to the test on September 14th at Big Cottonwood Marathon.  Our main goal for this race was to get a solid BQ time so we could go right home and register for Boston 2014 before it filled up.  We accomplished those goals and ran a solid 3:14 on a downhill course.  It was a lot of fun.

Here we are waiting at the top of Guardsman pass for the race to start.  The race did not get started without a hitch.  There were about 45 minutes where we were wondering if it would happen at all.  Here's why:

That's a bus, carrying a bunch of runners, trying to make the turn up Guardsman pass.  Mr. bus driver got himself high centered right over that hill.  This is a problem when the canyon is lined with other buses waiting to bring the rest of us up to the top of the canyon.  It's also a problem when there's no other way up.  We were still 3 miles from the race start, so there wasn't going to be any running up.  After a very amusing 45 minutes of watching a bunch of skinny runners try to push the bus off, while everyone else wandered around in the dark canyon trying to find somewhere to pee, they finally had us walk up 1/2 mile where another bus picked us up and shuttled us all up to the top.  Then eventually the bus was towed off.  We started 45 minutes late.  Oh well.

 The race itself was tricky.  It's difficult to run a course like that and we started out with a bunch of people who were trying to run a 3:05.  We paid for running that fast in the canyon and slowed WAY down after we came out onto the flat/hilly parts.  The last six miles were a bit of a death march - moreso than most marathons.  But it was enough to get both of us a PR and BQ.  It sure was fun to see our families at the finish.

 Now, we will take on a long winter of running in order to line up ready to go on April 21st, the day before Brynn's birthday.  Can't wait!!