Very Cool
March 20th, 2009 Posted in Story, Training
This past Thursday I began my West Coast swing to train on the Western course. I’ll be in Auburn, California, staying, working and playing at my good friends the Edwards’ home. They live 5 minutes from the trails and have been kind enough (crazy) to house the Diesel during his “tune up” sessions.
The Left Coast adventure began with running the Way Too Cool 50K for the eleventh time. It covers portions of the Western course and is the most popular ultra in the
We had temps in the mid 50s, partly sunny skies and dry, mostly smooth trails. The course has four challenging climbs - all steep and only one really runnable - the last of course! Brown’s Bar, Ball Bearing (a local favorite - the name says it all), Goat Hill and Up to 49er. The course management decided to wheel the course after 20 years of operation and discovered it was “short” 1.2 miles - which they felt compelled to add on at the beginning to make it an “official” 50K. I put this in the category of “who cares” and don’t understand why they bothered. 99% of the folks running this race compare their times year-over-year so all this does is screw that all up! Oh well, I find it all discouraging. Why can’t we just go out and run and have fun?
My goal was to run it steady as a training run and have enough legs to run the last 5 miles pretty hard - all either a pounding downhill or a long, 2 mile uphill. Goal 
accomplished. I finished feeling spent - but a good spent from fatigue not a hurt spent. After having run hill repeats in the Blue Hills the Saturday before with some of the Trail Animals and running past Sunday for 4.5 hours on the trails, I felt ths was a good indication of where I stood fitness-wise in my training schedule. I finished in 5:20 but adjusted for the old course a 5:06, which is my best time since 1996 when I was just a younf pup 
Dan Fowkes, my close friend and west coast running partner drove down from Portland and on zero training, ran and finished Cool for the umteenth time. He is one amazing (and tough) athlete.
Fun was had by all. The race was exceptionally organized by Julie, our new RD and the day could not have been more enjoyable. A good start to Tour de (pronounced DEE like Bob Roll reporting on Tour de France) Western.
