Afton trail 25K Race report

Saturday I toed the line at my first trail race since 2009. The distance was 25K (15.5 Miles) the surface trails with a cumulative elevation change just shy of 5,000 feet (so not a lot in my opinion but much more than the average runner would expect in a race), my time was 3:35:28 which is certainly not the fastest time I would have ever ran one of these but still averages out to 13:50 mile roughly.  Considering I went in to this race under-trained and one month calendar date from my last Cytoxan treatment I am more than just very pleased, I am ecstatic. I still deal with some small SLE and Neuro  issues most days but for the most part I feel very strong with all last year’s treatments  considered. Attached is a profile of the course in how the hills are.  This gives me a lot of hope that I will continue to have what I consider to be normalcy in my life and why a patient should never discount tomorrow. I believe I will be a better Lupus patient in the future knowing that even if I have a really bad flare again to not give up as my chances are good to be back out enjoying the trails, this race and my past flare also remind me to take as good of care of yourself as possible it can only help you in the future. While physically struggling a bit in my last climb I couldn’t help but to think of how much Lupus and trail running have in common, all you need to do is believe in yourself, do your best to take care of yourself and remember constant forward motion are what will get you to the finish line.

Lesson learned from a running stand point, I have a lot of work in front of me before Sawtooth 100 Mile Sept 6th 2013, although this course has a lot of small hills for the most part this trail is very easy (far easier than any trail that I train on in La Crosse) and with any sort of conditioning the only thing that adds any difficulty to a trained trail runner would be the heat that could come in July, fortunately for me it did not happen this year, the running gods smiled on me and gave me better results than I deserved, but with a sense of humility to train with coming out of it based on my lack there of hill strength. I have also possibly removed this from my race schedule next year, maybe I go up and volunteer instead or run a strong 25? I am not sure if this qualifies as a good training race for Sawtooth; devils advocate could say that it might still make one as long as you run it as it would give me more running than other midwest trail races but I noticed the trail also seemed to have a lot of camber to it which I tend to get injured with... still think I volunteer and then maybe run the Dances with Dirt 50K as a training run instead the following week... well enough babbling