The Sinister 7 was last weekend. In 2012 I failed to finish, so this year it was very important to me to make it. The peer pressure from frenemy runners was enormous. A big factor last year was the heat. So I was thankful when the weather report said it would be cooler. I was not happy that there was a 70% chance of rain.
Oddly, it never rained a drop. Although the heat on leg 3 was still there. I think that leg will always be hot. It climbs a mountain that was struck with a forest fire a decade ago, so there is a lack of shade.
I forgot to set my interval timer at the start, so I didn’t do 10-and-1s. But I think that is something I want to experiment with on ultras. I don’t know if walking every ten minutes is a good idea. At the start of the race, when I have extra energy and it is still cool, I shouldn’t waste time walking. Later on, I will be walking plenty when I hit the many uphills. And later in the day, I need to focus on keeping moving, and should ignore excuses to slow down.
That logic helped.
The only problem was I needed to remind myself to eat. Usually the interval timer is good for that. I had to do it on my own honour system. I had a new nutrition plan that seemed to work well. I did not use Boost for liquid calories and instead had a combination of protein balls and gels. That kept me going much better than usual.
I was fast. I had researched some timings by taking a runner from last year and using his times as my goal. If I followed that, I would finish with a nice buffer of time before the cutoffs. But things went better than that, and I consistently beat my goal. Sometimes by quite a big margin. My mother and sister were doing support, and I usually used a radio to let them know when I was coming in. It made a good catch at the end of leg 3, but on leg 4, my radio didn’t work. (Too humid I think.) So I surprised my sister when I just showed up, out-of-the-blue, at the transition just as they were just pulling in.
After that, I didn’t improve my times; last year, by leg five, I was running late, so I had to push it. With less pressure this year, I couldn’t be much faster. It also didn’t help that at the end of leg 4 I ate a lot, quickly, and had a very sour pink lemonade 5-hour energy. I thought I was still hungry as I progressed, so I kept eating. But that wasn’t empty stomach; that was upset stomach. An hour and a half into the leg I threw up. First time for me on a run. But I felt much better after that and did my best to pick up the pace.
The trails were dryer than I expected. With all the flooding that had happened, it could have been much worse. But GoreTex socks are great for keeping feet dry, and that prevents a lot of blisters. But, it doesn’t help with deep water that can go over them. There was a place on leg 4 that has a deep creek that is planned to soak you; they conveniently place an aid station right after it so you can recover. New this year was the lake before it. Usually, you pass to the side of it. But the fence marking someones property slowly went into it, forcing you to follow. That gave me a nice preliminary soak before the creek. So my feet sloshed around for two kilometres until I got to the aid station and changed socks and dried the GoreTex.
The last two legs are each 13km, and they are deceptively hard, especially if you have been running all day. Leg six is “downhill”. Yes, it is, overall. But there are a dozen gullies that have streams running through them, so you have steep downhills and steep uphills all the way. It is hard to get a good pace going. Leg seven was new for me, having failed to reach it last year, and the first two kilometres of if (no exaggeration) is straight up. Followed by a plummet that is too steep to use for catching up.
I was surprised by the ending. I had been told about it, but I didn’t think it would be as bad as it actually was. You can see the finish line at one point. And then they decide you should go on a complete circuit of the entire town instead of heading there. With a big hill right at the end. Malicious.
But I made sure to give a performance at the finish line. I wasn’t racing anyone; no one was behind me. So I collapsed on my knees and cheered the sky so the race photographer would get a good shot. Then I put my chip in the reader and officially finished.
My finisher prize? A bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot with my name and time on it; a bracelet with “SINNER”–all my runner friends agree that it looks gay; and a small towel because I didn’t throw it in.

And then a day later I lightly stubbed my foot which caused a fracture in the piggy that goes wee-wee-wee all the way home.