The past few nights after the race, I have had night sweats. I keep waking up wet and having to find a towel. I thought I would be back to normal now, but the part of my lip that had been irritating me turned into a cold sore yesterday, and it hurts. My feet are still pretty good, but different parts of my skin are itchy or irritated. The part of my ankle where my socks end continues to be itchy.
I am not one to complain, but it is hard to focus when all of these things keep taking my attention. I think I might stay home and try to spend the whole day in the bath to recover. I don’t really have the time, but it is hard to rest with my two kids. Last night, I tried, but I ended up making dinner and watching my kids as they played outside. I did take a bath for less than an hour, but I mostly feel about the same.
I know my day will go by fast if I stay home, but I think I need to try; maybe I’ll be more motivated to work tomorrow. There is no denying that I have a lot of things to do.
I have kept working on trying to recover my run, and I found this one website through AI that analyzed the file and was able to recover my average heart rate and the map, so that was cool to see it was still there, but I couldn’t get it to fix the file. Yesterday, I wrote down all of my lap times. It is still crazy to think about how long I was out there. It didn’t seem that long.
This run this morning was relaxing. The best part was seeing all the geese by the pond talking to each other. I wondered how long it would take me to observe them to have a better idea of their social structure.
See below for the first part of the race:
Day 4,008-11 —the Potawatomi 200 Part I: Cold Nights—
The Setup
It took at least an hour to get my tent up and all my bags in it. Part of me started to wonder if I did bring too much. I don’t think I considered how long it takes to eat food when I started stockpiling supplies for this race, but 200 miles (321.87 km) is such a long race. I have run 100 miles (160.93 km) now 10 times and completed 8 100-mile races. I fully appreciate that 100 miles is no joke. It is a long, long time, so doing it twice seemed like an extreme step up. Similar from going to a half to full marathon.
The first 40 miles (ca. 64 km) (ca. 64 km)
I ran the first two laps at a decent pace, and I was in the top 3 for a while. I was talking to this guy Pete for most of one lap and part of a different lap. He had such a great story! I wish I could share some of it, but it was too personal. He had attempted this race two times before and wasn’t able to finish for a variety of reasons. I asked everyone I ran with about their sleep strategy, and they shared different failed attempts and a variety of ways to achieve success.
The guy who had run it the most times told me one time he didn’t sleep at all and was delirious, so his friends put in a van and he slept for 3 hours. He didn’t share specifics of what he was going to do this time, but I heard from a lot of people that they would nap for 15 minutes and that would make a big difference. One of the guys told me that a 15-minute lap was a much better answer than more caffeine.
He also said there was some controversy around the person who got the top time on the course. He showed me the spot where if you turn on the trail you cut a mile off. The speculation was this runner might have accidently cut some miles off his later laps this way. The area was expertly marked this time, no chance anyone would cut the mile by accident.
The trail was more hilly than I thought. I read that it is 1,398 elevation gain per lap but I didn’t know what that would look like. The terrain was much better compared to some of the other trail runs I have done. There were no long sections of rocks, stones, or boulders. The ground was hard, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The downhills at times made it difficult to not run and land heavily on my legs.
I ran the first lap without poles, but after that first lap, I ran with poles for the rest of the race. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to extend my poles out, so while I was using them I was still a novice at best.
The first time I saw the creek crossing, I took my vest off and slipped on my rubber rain boots. It took me a while to get my vest on and off. To put it back on you have to snap a flexible string over a plastic hook that catches. Sometimes this process seemed to take forever.
At the end of lap 4 (mile 40) it was dark and I stayed a little too long in my tent. When I opened up my tent flap some cold wind, caused me to start to shiver. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, so I went back to my tent to change into my warm clothes, but I was still shivering and my hands were so cold, so I decided I needed to warm up before I went back outside to run.
I grabbed my hand warmers and my electronic neck warmer and zipped up my sleeping bag. I was huddled with my hands around my legs and watched the tent as it continued to get worse.
I don’t remember going to sleep but I must have because time started going by faster and twenty minutes had turned into an hour, but my hands were still cold and I didn’t understand why.
Suddenly there was a large crash and something hit my ten. Everything on top of the table fell on the ground which included a cup containing water and charging cords. I reached down on the ground to take the charger and put it away from the water.
I was having flashbacks of my last race when the coolers kept tipping over. I figured one of my coolers that was sitting outside my tent had flipped and I had a mess out there to pick up as well whenever I eventually got up.
It took me another 45 minutes before I started moving again. I wasn’t feeling that much better, but at the same time it was going to get more difficult to get out of my tent the longer I lay there. I put on my warm pants, a longsleeve shirt, two pairs of gloves, my hat and kept my hand warmers in my gloves and my pants.
It was so cold at this point. I could see my breath as I talked. When I opened my tent I saw someone’s tent had fallen on mine. It was still there pushing against the sides of my tent. At least my coolers hadn’t been knocked over.
Lap Distances Total Time Lap Time Lap Pace Time of Day
1 10 2:03 2:03 12:18 TH 2:03 p.m.
2 20 4:19 2:16 13:36 TH 4:19 p.m.
3 30 6:56 2:37 15:42 TH 6:56 p.m.
4 40 9:37 2:41 16:06 TH 9:37 p.m.
Tomorrow Part 2
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