Last week I attempted the Sinister 7. I wish I could say that I finished it, but I did not. I did not make the cutoff for the end of the second last leg; missed by fifteen minutes. It is the first time I have been unable to finish an ultramarathon.
Still, I did 135km under brutal conditions. It was +28 during the day, and the afternoon leg was over a mountain that had had a fire destroy all the trees. Hellish. Apocalyptic. Then at around four o’clock, while I was on top of a mountain, the cold rain hit, turning the rest of the mountain into mud. Slippery mud.
Most importantly, I never gave up. I timed out. I did not decide that I couldn’t make it any further. So I don’t have to constantly wonder if I could have made it.
But I should have been able to. My friend, that I’m personally competitive against, was able to finish the entire race with 37 seconds to spare. I was ahead of him most of the way. Except on leg 5, where I think all my problems happened. It was dark, and I was alone for most of it. It started to wear on me, and doubts appeared.
Overall, the biggest problem is I didn’t take the race seriously enough. I always assumed I would finish, and that is wrong. I should have made plans of how long each leg would take so I could better approximate how much I should rush. Because of that, I tended to linger on the transitions.
My mother was there to provide support, and she was great at it. But she was too good. She was supportive, but she never once told me that I had been there long enough and needed to get going. That is an important criteria in support.
Most legs started with a big hill, which meant that I would walk that part. I should have been more willing to go immediately, instead of remaining sitting down and continuing to digest food I had just eaten.
The first leg was okay, and was on streets a lot of the way. The second leg really started to go into the mountains. I wasn’t doing that bad, but the heat was starting to rise, and there was one part where it felt like they had placed a wall on the trail for people to climb over. The third leg was where things got bad. It involved climbing around a mountain that had been hit by a forest fire in nearly a decade ago; no cover from the sun.
By the fourth leg, it was cooling down and I was able to go faster. But I took too long at the transition to the fifth leg, trying to horn down a soup with much needed calories. I had been told the aid station was ten kilometres in, so two hours later when I met some ATV’s, I was shocked to hear it was still over four kilometres to go. I later found out it was 15km in. But the damage had been done. I had slowed down.
I finished the leg just ahead of the cutoff. I thought I would easily be able to make the next 12km in two hours. It was all downhill; how hard could it be.
Well, it was mostly downhill, but there were a lot of depressions in it that were too steep to run down. The aid station, I had been told was 9km in. But when I hit it, I was told I had 5km to go. That was when I had half an hour left before cutoff. I tried to rush, but there is only so much you can do. So I failed to finish that leg. When the cutoff time hit, I didn’t have the energy to make a strong finish, and I walked the rest of the way in. Fifteen minutes later, I was done.
I’m hoping this failure is good for me. I can’t assume I’ll always make it. This lesson should serve me well in France.