Post Cactus Rose 100
The following is a conclusion to a previous post
I knew I’d be hungry after the race, and since it would likely be the wee hours when I finished, I knew little, if anything, would be open. I checked ahead of time and found a gas station in Bandera that was open 24 hours/day and had a larger-than-usual selection when it came to food. When we got there, they weren’t open.
Instead, we soldiered on to Boerne, where we dropped off our hotel key and stopped in at the Kwik Chek next door. My dad got a coffee; I got a chocolate milk to compliment my Lenny and Larry’s mint chocolate chip cookie. Think something like a Clif bar, but it looks and tastes more like a cookie. They’re not cheap, but they taste great and have at least some nutritional value, which I felt was important for recovery purposes. I happily consumed it in between sips of chocolate milk on the rest of the ride home.
You’d think I would’ve slept most of the way home, but I was fully alert and spent the whole time chattering along with my dad. He was probably glad to have a chipper co-pilot at that hour. Almost precisely when we got home, at 4:30 AM, is when a wave of fatigue hit me, and I fell asleep immediately.
Then I woke up at 7:00 AM, after barely two hours of sleep. I’m simply used to waking up early, and the caffeine still coursing through my veins most likely had a say in this.
Once my dad woke up, we went out for kick-ass breakfast tacos, after which I promptly went down for a nap. Another two hours, I was now up to a whopping four hours of sleep. Went for a short bike ride with my dad and my friend Daron, drank a beer or two, ate a plate of nachos for dinner (Ya-Ya! Nachos!), then made an ice cream cookie sundae for dessert.
In the next few days, my dad and I whipped up some badass stir-fry, then made a half meat lover’s, half green curry chicken pizza. Goodness, how I’d missed this kind of stuff.
A look back, by the numbers:
- 100.8 miles
- ~12,000 feet of climbing
- 17:48:10 total time
- 10:41/mile average pace (including stops)
- 2.5 hour margin of victory
I’m thinking this will be my one and only 100-miler. It isn’t so much that I’d never want to do it again, it’s more that I wouldn’t want to do all the necessary training again. I’ve said it before, but it’s not so much what you have to do that makes it hard, it’s what you have to give up. And I’d like to go back to something closer to normal again.
June
