Friday, January 19, 2018

Resolution Beach & Trail Race 2018

Narragansett, RI
Sunday, January 14, 2018

This was the 7th edition of this beach and trail race at Scarborough State Beach.  I believe I have run the race every year, except last year when I had a conflict.  I haven't been training at all lately, and hadn't made up my mind to race this, until the night before when I signed up. 

I got to the race about 45 minutes ahead of the start.  The temps were cool, but not cold.  It was about 23 degrees at the start, but with a thaw, snow melt, and rain the previous two days, there would be a fair amount of ice.  On my warm up I ran into RD Mike G, who asked if I'd help put a few flags down.  I was happy to do so, but with the frozen ground, this was not an easy task!

The start:  With 23 and sunny and a very light wind at the start, I opted for short shorts and just a single layer on top.  It has certainly been much colder and windier at this race in some of the previous years.  Fortunately, there wasn't much standing around and according to my Strava post, the race started at 10:02am.  For the first time in the race's history, we started out going north, as the out and back southern beach section was nixed.  I followed Chris out at the start, but soon felt like I was breathing like a dinosaur and people were going by me handily.  Yeah, I really should do some speedwork.  I was really happy when we finally turned off the beach and momentarily out of the wind.  The lead woman went ahead of me here, and I cut into the sand trail just ahead of Leslie.

New trails:  I repassed the lead woman a minute or two later, and then at the point where we normally go onto Ocean Road, we took a hard right instead into some very recently cleared and still rough trails.  Good!  No roads at all on this race anymore.  The rough hewn trails gave me an advantage here, as I was able to pass three runners who slowed more than I did on the roots, holes, ice, etc.  One of them looked like a teenager and his previous nice stride turned into something more dainty here.  I couldn't wait to get past him.  Another one was a guy sporting a ponytail.

Icy shoreline trails:  As we exited this new section, we turned left back onto the old course and I knew a big patch of ice covering the width of the trail was coming up.  I had planned my route to hew closely to the left on the few clumps of grass to give me some traction.  It worked!  When we got onto the stone dust type of trails at Black Point (not my forte), I caught up to and passed Bob Corsi, but someone stuck with me and I couldn't tell if it was him or someone else.  I couldn't shake my shadow and he stayed with me the whole way back to the stone house.  At the ice patch, a woman coming the other way had stopped on MY grass clumps, my only safe passage.  NO!  I kept coming right towards her until she realized my intentions and fortunately gave me just enough room to pass.  Taking a sharp turn just before entering the stone house, I could see now that my shadow was Ponytail and not Corsi, the latter of whom I would later learn had gone down hard on the ice.

Beach return:   Coming out of the icy stone house foundation, you had to jump a wide stream, which was a really fun obstacle!  After the stream jump, Ponytail pulled up right beside and slightly ahead of me.  Youth - this was not going to work well.  I pushed hard and eventually retook him and even closed a bit on Turtle rivals Ralph Lufkin and Mike Daniels ahead of him, but alas I could catch neither. 

Final results:  16:22 (closer to 4K than 5K), 10th overall, 1st in my age group.

After cool-down and awards, met up at the Mews for lunch with a group of about 13 mixed Turtles and WTAC.  See, we can play nicely in the sandbox.  Lunch took just shy of two hours, so it's not something I have the time to do frequently, but it was enjoyable.  I can't believe I ever debated whether to not to run this race.  It was such a fun event!   Already signed up for the next event in the trail series:  Old Mountain Field 5K on February 10.

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