Clarke's Recap

Got to the event about an hour early (5am), where all the athletes meet up at a church for race information. I brought road shoes and trail shoes because I didn't know what the terrain would be like. People there are about 50/50 split on the types of shoes so I went with the road ones, which were significantly lighter. There were about 50 people in the room, but it was really quiet. There was lots of nervous stretching going on. Most of the people there were like me in that it was their first 50 mile experience. Eventually it gets close to start time so we are herded outside. They give the final instructions and then send people off. I did not have a headlamp, but I definitely should have thought to bring one. At the beginning, the trail was very poorly maintained and I would have definitely risked an ankle if I wasn't following somebody with adequate lighting to see the trail arrows and obstacles. For the first 10 miles or so I'm basically trying to find some company to run with. Most of the people I initially go with are doing some sort of "run 4 miles/walk 0.1" or "run 4 minutes/walk 1 minute". It was very uncomfortable for me, and I never trained like that, so I had to dump them, which made me very uneasy. Every time they would ask me, "what was your longest training run?". They had all run at least 30 miles on at least one occasion. When I responded with 10 miles, I got double takes every time. Some of them were condescending, and all of this made me a little nervous to drop them. Finally about 15 miles in, I started running with a 5 time 50 mile finisher, who I stayed with until about 41 miles where he dropped me like a bad habit. I ended up lapping the original group I was with. We ran continuously except for a period between 32 miles and 41 where we walked every so often (this was the lowest point of my morale). After 41 miles, I stopped walking altogether because it was too hard to get started again. In hindsight, I don't know how much this actually helped. At the time, slowing to a walk felt really good, but it always took a lot out of me to start up again. I truly don't know if it would have made it easier or harder to finish without walking. We shared the course with lots of runners from different categories (the longest being 100 miles), and I saw all of the 100 milers walking at some point, which leads me to believe there is a smart way to include walking in the race that will decrease overall time, but I still haven't figured that out yet. How I basically break down the race is on a pain scale (0 = no pain, 10 = most excruciating pain ever experienced). The mileage numbers seem strange but that is because they are between checkpoints (where we get our bib marked as evidence).
0-16 miles --> 1/10
16-32 --> 2/10
32-41 --> 6/10
41-50 --> 7/10
The last nine miles weren't so bad mentally because I knew I was close to the finish. There is only probably a 10-15% chance I could have made it to 100 miles. The pain was very bad, and although I never thought about quitting, the whole endeavor really made me want to reevaluate the goal of doing 100 miles. The pain is very real the entire time. 7/10 pain feels like you're running on feet with broken bones (which I think I did). A 100 mile race means an additional 12 hours (at least) where I would need to run on broken feet, and I'm not sure mentally I'm there yet. I need to do a lot of thinking about it. It was a very humbling experience.