Red Not (Hot) 50k, Injury, and the 2010 Season

Coming up on the eve of the Red Hot 50k+, I'm really starting to feel the sting of lost time.  Red Hot was my  first race of the season last year and with its bare trails and varied terrain was the perfect antidote to a snowy winter that played prelude to a great first half of 2009, which culminated in my inaugural 100 at Bighorn.

I'd hoped for a carbon copy schedule this year.  Red Hot, followed by a trip to Ojai for the mania of Chris Scott's Coyote Two Moon; a final tune up in Pocatello in May, then the big appointment at the end of June, only this time with Western States in place of Bighorn.

Injuries, though, chart other courses.  And although I haven't had Red Hot on my schedule for a while now, the coming and going of the actual race day is a hard thing to confront - partly because it was such a great experience last year, which I wanted to repeat, but also because it makes me wonder what may have to be lopped off the schedule next. 

Injuries are part of the game, of course, and my current one, as with most, has a rich and boring history to it.  The short story is that it's bad knee pain likely caused by IT band issues.  But it's been going on since early November, and for the last two months, I've been breaking out the calendar and training schedules to plot those dreaded fail-safe dates, the day after which I have to drop a race if I'm not up to a certain training volume. Red Hot - gone.  Coyote - gone.  Antelope Island - possible. And so on.

Thankfully, my knee seems to be showing a bit of halting progress.  And even if it comes in fits and starts, I'll take what I can get.  After all the miles and hours and vertical of last season, where anything under 5 miles hardly seemed worth the time, I'm getting reaquainted with the pure joy of running, however short the distance.

Of course, each successful outing makes me hungry for more, much more - especially as the start at Squaw seems so close - but right now the best thing I can do is push away from the table and           just          be         patient.

(Photo: Greg Norrander)

After the Lottery - 100 Mile Experience in Western States 100 Lottery Winners

To be sure, confetti was tossed by many of those glued to their computers and smart phones yesterday, but it was set up to be a disappointing day for most. The odds simply foretold it. Less than 20 percent would make it out of the Western States 100 lottery and get a golden ticket to the Big Dance in June 2010. The probability was just large enough to spark great hope but small enough to ensure a big wave of disappointment as the last few winners were pulled and eager would-be runners found their names left in the netherworld GU2O bucket of the UltraSignup server. I could go more in to the ups and downs of the day, but Craig Thornley captured it very well in his post last night.

As folks recover from the lottery hangover, surely the debate will continue about the size of the lottery and the possible need to revise qualification standards to make Western States a more selective race - akin to the Boston Marathon. As an adjunct to this discussion, I thought I'd follow up my previous post on the number of applicants with 100 mile race histories in the lottery, with one on the number of those who actually made it out of the lottery who actually had 100 mile history.

I followed the same general method as in the previous analysis (see post for details), and as such it has some of the same frailties. Overall it's a slightly blurred snapshot but one that should capture the general trend.

Not surprisingly, the results are quite parallel between the applicants' histories and the winners' histories. Where about 61 percent of the 1519 applicants had ever completed a 100 miler (as found in Ultra Signup results) and 54 percent had completed one in 2008 or 2009; 64 percent of the 270 lottery winners had ever done a 100 miler, with 56 percent of winners notching at least one in 2008/2009.

Clearly, these numbers are not groundbreaking news, and they seem to provide fodder for those on either side of the debate. For some, they'll show that the current liberal qualifying standards still allow a fairly 100-experienced field to toe the line. For others, it'll show that a good percentage of folks who have demonstrated their ability to complete a 100 mile race will be left out of the Grande Dame of 100's, their spots going to some folks whose hardest race may have been a flat 50 miler.

At Least 60 Percent of Applicants in Western States 100 Lottery Have 100 Mile History

Update: (12-6-09) Post-lottery report on number of lottery winners with 100 mile history (update).

Yes, The North Face Endurance Challenge Championship is this Saturday, and despite astounding battles setting up at the head of the 50 mile race in both the men's and women's fields, a good number of us will be shackled to our computers and smart phones not to see if Uli can run down Geoff Roes in the closing kilometers but to see if we drew the golden ticket in the lottery for the 2010 Western States 100 (site).

Amidst all the anticipation, there's been a great deal of thoughtful and often fervent discussion about qualification standards for Western. Craig Thornley's most recent post on the the current lottery has drawn over 100 comments alone (post), and for a full immersion in the niceties of the myriad views on the topic, I suggest you read Craig's post and comments. But, one of the perennial issues is whether Western States - the quintessential 100 on the calendar many would argue - should require a 100 mile qualifier rather than the more liberal qualifying standards currently in place.

Flipping through the applicant pool last month on Ultra Signup, it seemed to me that a good portion would already meet a 100 mile qualifying standard. So, with too much time on my hands as I work through an off-season injury, I decided to click through the site with Madame Defarge-like tenacity to get a more accurate sense of what proportion of the current applicant pool has completed a 100 mile race in 2008/2009 or at any other time, as found in the Ultra Signup database.

A few caveats. This is a slightly blurry snapshot. Applicants were being culled as I was going through, so it was a bit of a moving target. Some applicants clearly showed results for people with the same name. Foreign applicants often listed no results. I assume many of these runners had 100 mile equivalents, but I didn't count them, unless their profile photo showed them finishing UTMB (a very small number). Finally, crashed browsers or fighting kids may have resulted in a few errant clicks on my part.

So, what did the numbers show? Out of a current pool of 1519 approved and pending applicants, a little over 60 percent (923) have at some point completed a 100 mile race registered in the Ultra Signup database. Just under 54 percent (818) have completed a 100 mile race recently - in either 2008 or 2009.

Exactly what these results would mean for the size of a lottery requiring a 100 mile qualifier is unclear. Yes, the pool would be smaller, but it certainly wouldn't be an easy in. These numbers here are likely an underestimate, and still, over 900 applicants have completed a 100 miler in the past, over 800 of them fairly recently. If a 100 mile qualifier were put into place in a year like this one, it's likely that lottery numbers would still crest over 1,000, possibly well over.

The implications this would have on the quality and character of the race, I'll leave for others to discuss.

Western States 100 Cancelled as Fires Rage, Runners Look to Move On

With wildfires consuming what seems to be half of Northern California (USFS fire map), the trustees of the Western States 100 made the prudent, yet very hard, decision yesterday to cancel the race, originally set to take off Saturday June 28 @ 5:00am (race announcement). One of the world's renowned ultra races that's also extremely hard to get in to, the disappointed souls have to be legion. But true to the ultra-running philosophy, most of the key players are taking the news in stride and using their fitness as a springboard to the next starting line.

Here's a sampling from the blogs:

• Andy Jones-Wilkins (AJW)
• Sean Meissner
• Karl Meltzer
• Scott Dunlap