23 hours, 52 minutes
I haven’t written about my fun athletic endeavors lately and since I had a big one a couple months ago, I thought I’d talk about it.
After my 6th Ironman in 2016, my friend and I decided that in 2017 we were going to take on a new challenge. That challenge turned out to be a 100 mile run on rocky dirt trails in the Arizona Desert. Training for a 100 mile run takes some time in order to build up enough leg strength and stamina to make it that far, so last February we found a race called the Javalina 100. The race was set for the end of October, so that gave us about 8 months to train for it. That was Perfect!
We followed a structured training plan that started off pretty mellow running about 30 miles each week and progressively increased up to 70 miles each week All of our training went according to plan and two days before the race my wife and I drove to Arizona to meet up with my friend and his wife, who flew in from Colorado. The race organizers give each runner 30 hours to finish but, our goal was to pace ourselves properly enough to finish in just under 24 hours. That was a pretty strong goal since neither of us had run 100 miles and didn’t know what to expect.
Race morning started with the gun going off at 6am as 800 of us started slowly running in the dark. The format for this particular race was FIVE 20-mile loops. Being able to see family and friends at the end of each 20-mile loop gave us something nice to look forward to every 4 or 5 hours. We were pacing our race pretty well, but we slowed a bit as the heat increased in the afternoon. By that time we were about 40 miles into the race. The sun went down around mile 50 and that cooler air gave us energy to run a bit faster, so we were able to get back some of our lost time.
Fast forward to the final loop which were miles 80 to 100. These were the toughest miles since we were physically, emotionally and mentally tired as well as sleep deprived, since these final 20 miles were being run between midnight and 6am. We were very close to our 24 hour goal, so during the final 10 miles I was routinely looking at my watch calculating how fast we had to run to make our goal and whenever I said we needed to run this section faster, we’d both groan….and then run it faster.
We actually crossed the finish line at 5:52am which was 23 hours and 52 minutes of one heck of a journey! As you can see I like challenges so, if you think your painting project is too challenging to handle, give us a call. We can do it and we‘ll see you at the finish line!
Sincerely, Greg Lewis