A famous quip often attributed to Mark Twain goes like this: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one.” Luckily, I’ve had a lot of time to think about the run at Black Canyon, even if I haven’t had much time to write about it. In short, I had a rough time during the run and missed each time goal I’d set for myself, finishing at around 13:30 hour mark. For context, my A goal for the event was to finish in 10 hours.

There are of course many reasons for the bad experience. Here are the main reasons related to my preparation for the event, in order of importance:

• Lack of long descending in training. I did most of my training running loops in a local park. The longest descend on that loop takes maybe 3 minutes. In Black Canyon, by contrast, there is approximately 5 hours of descending in the beginning of the race. This messed up my stomach in a serious way, resulting in an inability to hold anything in after the half way point of the race.
• Relying on food I didn’t like. I never cared for the taste of the Precision gels that I ate through my training block, but that dislike never became an issue during my 3-4 hour training runs. Not so in Black Canyons: after the first 5 hours, I really couldn’t deal with the sweetness of the gels. I tried to eat a few gels after the half way point but would throw up immediately. Aid station food like potatoes and watermelon worked fine.
• Preparing for the wrong eventualities. In my mind, the main hurdle for achieving my goals or finishing the race was some kind of injury. “What if my IT band starts hurting?”, etc. For some reason, I never thought about the possibility of GI issues. Therefore, I probably wasn’t careful enough in trying to manage the first signs of problems, like when it really started getting difficult to keep in the “gel every 20 minutes” rhythm.

The good news is that fixing the above issues seems perfectly doable. I don’t think I’m going to run Black Canyon again as I didn’t particularly like the rocky course, even if the event and the Arizona desert are exceptional. I’ve already set my sights on a local race, Cuyamaca 100K, which takes place in October in some of the most beautiful trails in San Diego. I won’t be keeping a weekly training log as the summer is going to be busy, but I’ll still be dropping occasional training, adventuring and racing updates.