Well, no disaster really. Just a bad day. It was a 2:45 drive down to do the race, so I had to get up at 5:00 on a campus where getting up at 11:00 on a Sunday is considered early - and with my wife and daughter away for the weekend I could actually have taken advantage…

The Seven Sisters is a 12 mile, out-and-back trail run in the Holyoke range near Amherst, MA. On of its claims to fame is that even though it has less total elevation than Mt Washington and has no net elevation change, everyone runs a slower pace there. Which is to say the foot is sketchy in places.
I went out in the lead, because that’s how I like to race. About 10 minutes in there was only one guy with me, and he passed me when I slipped on an uphill, grabbed a tree to keep from slipping backwards, and then couldn’t go up or down. I got back behind him and after realzing that he was wearing an Ipod resolved that I would not let him beat me.
It was the only resolution I kept today. After opening a gap on him, I was passed by the eventual winner. Shortly after he dropped me, I was given confusing instructions by a course marshal which led me to take a 4 minute detour. I found the course again and was in 7th place, which I held to the turnaround.
On the way back I soon realized that I didn’t have the speed to catch anyone ahead of me. Perhaps with the four minutes back I could have held them off, but they were gaining then and I had an extra half mile on my legs which didn’t help anything.
I was passed by maybe three runners on the way back. I could more or less hang with anyone on the uphills, but once I was out of the top three my motivation to work the downhills (and risk injury) evaporated, and I lost stunning amounts of time. Also, once I wasn’t racing for the win I noticed that my new trail shoes were giving me blisters on the balls of my feet. When I am racing well I can ignore something like that. Not today.
Then it was over, or at least the running part of the bad day was. While I was standing around at the finish one of the guys who passed me late in the race told me “you run up hills really well for a heavyset guy.” And when I got to my car I found that my CamelBack (which I brought but didn’t race with) had leaked all over my passenger seat and also on my dry change of clothes! It was not a fun drive back.

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