A Race Report.
My Grandpa always said : “That ditch looks stupid.”
Setup: CC50 Takes place in Cloudland Canyon State Park, in GA, tucked into the GA=>AL/TN armpit. Also, when I say ‘armpit’ I’m thinking of the armpit of this French… chaudasse… I met on a backpacking trip. While doing some stream-laundry near a campsite, she reduced herself enough to reveal a part of the female body I was not then prepared to admire in writing. What I’m saying is: that’s an armpit you want to see more of. Y’all deal with that.
The “ditch” really is majestic in it’s own right. On a clear and crisp day, with fall colors, it would be a 10/10 view. Race day was not a clear nor crisp day. Some pals and I drove over from Chattanooga in the wee hours of a Saturday that opened up with “go f*&k yourself” amounts of fog. It had already been a wet week with more rain promised for race day.
At the park was your standard race check-in, some guy with a microphone claiming he’s a “moderately successful” podcast host, a gathering around a guy who self-identifies as the “Runbum” saying something about “waterfalls poppin’ off HARD” and “y’all aren’t here to have fun”… something like that, and then a bunch of idiots ran towards a stupid ditch.
Race: I ran a respectable half marathon down into that ditch. That much involved a couple miles on park road, a fast section of the north rim trail, then a ~1500ft descent primarily on stairs. Going down, no problem. Going up, one problem. My college circuits professor (Dr. ‘Chuckles’ C. ) would have called it “letting the magic smoke out.” There’s apparently magic smoke inside many ICs that make them work. The same is true for the lower half of the human body. I let the magic smoke out of my legs, at the top of those stairs, right before the rain came.
The second half of the course was miserably runnable, and things went to tedium in the rain. Every step was 10% ice skate. At Ascalon Road AS, a volunteer giggled when I asked her to pour ginger ale directly into my mouth from the 2L bottle. Kneeling in the mud and gravel, I received her anointment. Then, moving with dignity and haste away from the sanctuary of Ascalon, I made it to the treeline where I could take a much needed pee break.
“Winners pee on the move,” I heard my grandpa say.
About this time, on the dismal loop from Ascalon back to Ascalon, things got fun again. The section looked and felt surreal like a scene from 28 Days Later, sans zombies : dark, densely wooded, and DRENCHING. The landscape helped transport me to that slaphappy place you can often only get to when you’re two beers in and thinking about your own mortality, or when someone farts during sex.
Time dilation kicked in, and I “woke up” at the finish line covered in some dude’s beard-glitter with ‘Runbum’ saying “ Just another day at the office, aye bro !?”
Aye, bro.
After:
Finsh Line Party Score: 7/10
Glitter Beard DJ
Hot soup
Beer
Shivering and Cassie giving me her rain jacket
More Beer