Day 13: Big Sky Half Marathon
Today I ran the third race of my trip, the Big Sky Half Marathon here is Southern Montana. The race itself was a lot of fun— we met up at the finish line, which was on a bridge over a river at the bottom of a valley. Then we rode in a school bus up to the top of one of the nearby mountains, and the race took us all the way back down. So, the entire race was downhill— according to my Garmin, I did almost three thousand feet of descent over the course of the race, a starting height of around 8k down to the valley floor (which is still 5k above sea level, since we are up here in the high desert). I feel like I’ve really got the altitude under control at this point, and my fitness has improved quite a bit over these last few weeks of running, plus camping diet, so I ran well the entire way. At the end, they told me I won my age group, which is pretty cool, but given that we all got up to the start line in a school bus I’m not sure how many 40 year olds there were.
I did take a pretty good tumble into the gravel about 4 miles in. I wrote yesterday about my trick ankle that’s been bothering me recently and, wouldn’t you know it, it got tricky. I rolled the ankle going over some rocks and lost my balance pretty bad. I had a few stumbling steps to put my affairs in order before I hit the ground, which meant it wasn’t a total disaster, but I still hit hard enough to scrape up knees, elbows, and hands, and to split one of my lips on a tooth. There was not significant damage though, so I got to run the last nine miles of the race covered in blood but otherwise none the worse for wear. The ankle remains a work in progress, but it didn’t bother me the rest of the race.
I’m less crazy about the overall race administration, though. The t-shirts were all ridiculously small. I started out at a Large, which had to hope of fitting me, and ended up with a 2XL, which I can technically get over my body but couldn’t possibly move in. Communication was also weird— yesterday at noon I thought I was getting on a bus at 5:30 AM, which turned into ‘be there around 6:30,’ which ended up with us boarding a bus a little before 8 AM. This is partly because they were also running a marathon today and needed to get those folks up even further into the mountains, but it’s not like that was a surprise to them at the last minute. Regardless, I had fun.
I spent the rest of the day sitting in the shade reading a book. It’s too hot to do anything else, and it was a pretty pleasant use of the last eight or so hours. Now I’m getting ready to go to bed early because tomorrow, we push on to Glacier National Park. Wish us luck!
