Sean's Run Like Hellathon 2 Report

Ok, this is a week late, but I have the IRS and work to blame. I joined a cult called GUTS (Georgia Ultrarunning and Trailrunning Society) and one of the members put on a run for the second year. Instead of doing a long boring training run on his own, he mapped out a 1.13 mile loop around his neighborhood, rented a Porta-Potti, offered his parent's front porch as an aid station, and invited everyone to come over and run as much or as little as they wanted in 12 hours. The course opened up at 7 AM. I slept in and showed up around 11 AM. My plan was to run a minimum of 4 hours if I was feeling bad and a maximum of 6 hours if I was feeling great. (Remember I had run 50 miles just two weeks before.) We were all asked to bring shareable food and drinks, so I dropped off my can of Pringles, bag of animal crackers, and bottle of Gatorade. Three runners came by about this time and I asked if they were slow enough that I could follow them for a lap so I would know where the course turns were. They assured me they would be slow since they had already been running for several hours. Kena was one of the runners, she had just run the tough SweetH2O 50k the weekend before and was taking it easy so I could keep up with her. She prefers the 24 hour and 100 mile runs. After the first lap, I was mostly on my own, but I did get to run with Matt Jenkins for a bit. He was running with a 30 pound pack and was barefoot, training for a 760 mile run across North Carolina to raise money for the Western Youth Network. Another Bad-A$$ dude was Jason. He showed up planning to run 6 laps for a 10k since he had also run the SweetH2O the weekend before. However, when new people showed up, he went out and did another couple of laps. Before he knew it, he was 4 laps short of a marathon, so he succumbed to peer pressure and did that. Then, of course a 50k was within reach, and once again the peer pressure kicked in and he ended up doing 28 laps for a total of 31.64 miles. Way to go Jason!

I stuck with my plan and at 5:59:29 I had completed 26 laps for a total of 29.38 miles. Although I only had 2 more laps to do a 50k, I did not succumb to peer pressure and had a beer instead.

In other training, I ran a total of 61.4 miles last week and 52.9 miles this week since I did a "short" long run of only 15 miles today.