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2021 Oakland Hills Trail Run 35k race report – Oakland, CA

2021 Oakland Hills Trail Run 35k race report – Oakland, CA

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It was so nice to toe a real-deal starting line, with a bib pinned to my shirt, and stand around to use a Honey Bucket — the whole shebang! — last Saturday. I can’t not smile when I think about it. I’m short on time (as always) to post before bedtime, so I’ll forgo the pics this week and will include them next week, instead.

Anyway. When I saw that Inside Trail Racing (ITR) was hosting a 35k race in the Oakland hills just a couple weeks before my 50k race, I couldn’t pass up the serendipitous timing. The race would boast about 4,600 of elevation, give me a welcomed change of scenery, and basically offer a supported long run, probably my last real long-long run before my 50k. Any one of those qualities is hard to pass up; that the race offered all of them would make me a fool for not taking advantage of it. 

Plus — big plus! the clincher! — I couldn’t discount the enormous bonus points status that the race would situate me nicely in the east bay and thus give me good reason — and ready access! — to meet up with friends there I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. 

I treated “race week” (even though I wasn’t viewing it as a race, per se) as the soft beginning to my taper, so by the time Saturday rolled around, I only had about 20 or so miles in my legs and less than 2k of elevation. I had also probably run roads more often that week than I had in all of my training cycle, too, just to give my legs a break from climbs and to run for less time than usual. Otherwise, “race week” life was pretty normal, full of the normal life obligations with kids’ activities and school and such. Chill was the name of the game.

Temps on race morning in the woods were mild and wet, and I was pleasantly surprised that the rain gods and goddesses blessed us with their precipitative gifts for the entiiiiiiire morning in the form of fog, mist, rain, and the ever-popular sideways-rain. 50-60-or-so degree temps, alongside the rain, made for a pretty comfortable run in shorts and a LS, though I elected to remove the LS and stay in a short sleeve from about mile 3-onward. A visor kept both my hair and the rain out of my face, and I never really needed the sunnies that stayed atop my head for my 5:03 hour endeavor for the “35k.” (Trail races usually aren’t known for their precision; it’s all good). 

I felt, let’s call it, “cautiously optimistic” or “optimistically hopeful” about being able to cover the distance and the elevation without a lot of fanfare. More than anything, I appreciated the opportunity to yet again practice my nutrition strategy (but with the support of aid stations). As I have in my long runs of 16+ miles, I carried about 64 oz. of water on me (between two Ultimate Direction bottles, a backup floppy UD bottle, and two 10 oz. no-name bottles I bought from Uncle Bezos), enough SiS gels to take one every four miles (with a couple extra as back-ups), and a tube of SiS hydrate tabs. It made for a rather packed hydration vest, but everything fit. (Not an affiliate link or anything, but I’ve had this vest [in different colors] since 2014, when I was training for my other 50k, and it has really held up well).  

The night before the race, I finally received High-Performance Nutrition for Masters Athletes from the library, and from the very little I read before I went to bed, I decided that I probably needed to be drinking more of the SiS carbohydrate drink on the run than I had been using on my training runs. I know, I know, “nothing new on race day” and all of that, but again, “cautiously optimistic” or whatever. It felt right, so I went with it. Fortunately, my stomach fared well with this little last-minute experiment, and I honestly think it helped me feel really good pretty much all morning long. I wasn’t going for any land record speeds or anything, but when I finished, I felt like I could probably keep going for a bit longer. I attribute that to the better fueling.  

I didn’t even bother to do a warm-up or a cool-down — I don’t usually for training runs, so y’know, do more of the same — and I’m glad I didn’t because it allowed me to spend time with Connie before the race and Meredith afterward! I hadn’t seen Connie in years at that point and Meredith pretty much the same, save for our brief encounter in GGP a few weeks (months?) back for XC. It was wooooooooooonderful. 

Shortly after I finished, Meredith and I hauled out to Alameda to meet up with Connie and Meg, and Janet also hauled up from SJ for the morning’s fun… and of course, we have no pictures (except of passing around baby J). Seriously, for as much as I enjoyed the training run in the redwoods and ferns and all (so many ferns!), spending time with friends made my heart swell. 

It’s hard to believe that race day is almost here, but I’m excited and happy to report I’m feeling well! With not a lot of training left between now and race day, hay, please allow me to introduce you to barn.      

Happy November, ya’ll.

taper (and tapir) love

taper (and tapir) love

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Generally speaking, my relationship with the taper varies considerably (not to be confused with my relationship with tapirs, which remains positive. Sending love to my fellow herbivores, always).

Sometimes we read about runners or athletes having “taper tantrums” since they’re dealing with the challenge of working out less than they’re accustomed to, all in the interest of arriving on race day fresh, peaked, and ready to roll. 

When you’re used to working out X times a week and suddenly you are working out X-Y minutes/hours/miles instead, it can definitely feel a little disorienting. What are you going to do with all your new-found time?!?! 

For some people, this extra time that they’re not spending running or training gives them plenty of opportunities to fret and begin to second-guess everything they’ve done for the past who-knows-how-many weeks and months, which obviously isn’t advantageous leading into a race. 

At the other end of the spectrum, of course, is marching toward and entering Taperlandia almost triumphantly because sometimes just getting through training in one piece is cause for celebration — nevermind what actually transpires on race day. 

Athletes may feel like they’ve been teetering on the brink, that they’ve been straddling the line of injury or overtraining, until suddenly they can pull back the curtain, relax a little, and step back in intensity and/or duration to catch their breath (figuratively, literally, maybe both). 

For some, the taper can’t arrive soon enough, and they welcome it with very open arms (and very tired bodies).

I’ve been in both camps, as well as everywhere in between. For most of my marathons I’ve run, particularly before I had children, training was usually occurring within the confines of a lot of other stuff, particularly graduate school (x2), internships, full-time work, commuting, and the like. The weeks when everything was heavy felt particularly impossible, making me feel like I didn’t have a respite from anything… until suddenly, taper, voila, and the heavens parted and the angels sang and the renewal process began. It was glorious.

In the only other 50k I’ve ever done, it was much the same. No longer were my weekends full of back-to-back long runs; suddenly, sleep became more of a thing than it was before, as was time to do non-running-related pursuits. I guess I didn’t realize how much time, relatively speaking, I was spending on running until I began to intentionally run less.

More recently, time and experience (and life circumstances being what they are with being married, having two young kids in school, and that sort of thing) has taught me to embrace the taper and not sweat the details too much. I think it matters less what you haven’t done and more of what you have done, within reason. Time is a finite resource for all of us, and we do the best we can with the resources and time we have available (and, when needed, we adjust our goals accordingly relative to our training).

Sweating what we haven’t done is a waste of precious time and mental real estate.

Focus on what you have (or in this case, what you’ve done), not on what you haven’t, ya know?

It’s the same refrain I echo to my kids on the regular. 

In the event that I feel a bit more “springier” than normal, I try to harness whatever nerves I have and redirect them to more fruitful endeavors, such as accomplishing the non-running stuff that has taken a back burner or, ideally, getting more sleep or rest than I usually can. 

This comes with varying levels of success as I evaluate my priorities. In this regard, in the past month, I’m happy to say that I’ve been getting more sleep than usual (to the detriment of my morning daily ritual with the NYT). I can assure you, however, that my clean laundry is still scattered in piles throughout my house because I have “no time” to put it away. Again: priorities.  

After last week’s cutback 16 mile LR (“cutback” = 16 miles, you know you’re in endurance training mode when…), that I completely and utterly lollygagged because I felt tired AF, the weekend’s running was pretty limited due to an all-weekend-long swim meet (which I knew was coming and for which I planned accordingly). 

low-hanging clouds on S. Rim after Friday’s storm

I was able to get in an easy ~50 minutes on Saturday after the meet, but on Sunday, I couldn’t Life Tetris my schedule to make a comparably-meaningful run happen unless I: 

a) woke up at 4am to run at 5am  — which I tried to do, and failed — to be home by 6am to wake-up the kids and get them ready, or 

b) ran through a rain deluge (that had been raging since 7am) at around 8pm at night. 

I cut my losses and ran for an easy mile, like 10’ or so, around 8pm just to keep the streak alive and to play in the glorious and much-needed rain for a few. It was enough.

When I finished, I all but declared that taper, I’m looking forward to your embrace. 

It harkens back to the this whole idea about “the totality”; I could sweat the ~4 miles that I didn’t run last week that put me just shy of my mileage goal for the week, or I could just take comfort in the fact that my extra sleep Sunday morning was probably more meaningful — and probably better for my fitness adaptations — than running an extra forty minutes that day (and especially after being at a meet all day, all weekend, and everything else that I had going on Sunday). 

The 50k is coming up here fast, so this week is a little mini-taper before a 35k on Saturday morning, the last long-LR before the big day. I’m going into the weekend’s race with a clean slate and rockin’ attitude because there’s literally no basis of comparison here for me. I’ve never run a 35k race, and in fact, I’ve only ever done a couple other trail races before (and not at this specific distance and not at the location where I’ll be going). I’ve run 35k in marathon training runs and in marathons, of course, but never really as its own, stand-alone thing and most definitely not in a trail racing environment. 

It’s actually pretty rad to be going into a race with no real expectations or hopes or goals beyond finishing.

I’m feeling pretty stoked and jazzed and am looking forward to a few more days of low-key running between now and then.