Long Runs

At the top of the pass, after a brutal hour and fourty minutes of climbing.

For the majority of my life I have been a competitive athlete in one form or another, and during that time my idea of what great fitness is has changed quite a lot. These days I see the pinnacle of fitness being in running, specifically, in long distance trail/mountain running. The elite ultra runners are simply freaks of nature. Over the course of an ultra race like the Western States 100, for example, the top guys are covering those 100 trail miles with 18,000 feet of total ascending, and 23,000 feet of total descending in a little over 15 ½ hours. That is unreal. There is no level of fitness beyond that. One day I would love to be able to run that distance, but at this point it is so far beyond me that it is hardly worth thinking about.

I have been running for years, but it wasn’t until I started exclusively running on trails and enjoying the act of running that I started to think of myself as a runner. I can’t imagine a more pure form of fitness then running in the mountains. It is primal, it is natural, and when you are doing it, it just makes sense. Running in the wilderness is something that has been going on for millions of years. It happens to be when I do my clearest thinking, when I have had my best ideas, and when my mind is the calmest.

Saturday morning I got dropped off up in Summerset. From there I ran up the southwest side of Peavine Mountain, to the summit, down the east side of the mountain, then home. I didn’t bring the dogs with me because this time of year I am worried about snakes and I knew that I would be out in the heat of the day. It was also the hottest day of the year up to this point, and it just wasn’t an ideal situation to be running dogs.  It would be a really bad deal if one of them got bit so far from help, or started to overheat a long ways from water. It is very rare that I ever run without them and this really weighed on me during the run. (The dogs got three runs in this week so I don’t feel too bad for them.) The other thing that took away from the experience was a lack of fluids. I ran with four bottles, but it wasn’t enough. I needed at least another bottle or two, as I was absolutely smoked with about an hour still left in the run. It was at about that point that I stopped sweating, and that is never a good thing. I am about a month away from the 50K, and Saturdays run didn’t do a lot to build my confidence that it will be a good experience. I covered 21 miles with 3000 feet of total ascending. The first hour and forty minute was nonstop uphill and even today, two days later, I can feel it in my quads.

I was hoping to see a bunch of wildlife, but other than one small heard of deer and a whole lot of quail, the trail was pretty lonely.


A nice view on the way down the mountain.



Jay Kincaid