KEEP MOVING FORWARD 2023 - Race #2
BURCS Frozen Folly 50k (SOLO)
Sunday Jan 15 - Mon Jan 16, 2023
The BURCS Frozen Folly 50k is the outdoor companion to the BURCS Treadmill Marathon/50k/100k, a January virtual event that gives participants a 24 hour window of their choice to complete their chosen distance, either outdoors or indoors on a treadmill. For some unknown reason, this crazy-stupid idea seemed appealing to me (keep in mind that I also did the BURCS Circadian Challenge in July 2020, which required completing at least 13.1 mi during two consecutive 8:00-8:00 12 hr periods) and I decided that this was the year to go for it.
I ended up splitting my 50k into three parts:
19 Mile Run on the Albany County Rail Trail - starting at 12:23 PM on Sunday, I spent 5 hours running the length of the rail trail out and back. While I've run sections of the trail many times and even ran almost the whole length one way during last year's Heldeberg to Hudson Half Marathon, I've never done this before (probably because it's been over a decade since I last ran more than 16 miles.)
2.8 Mile Walk around the Pine Hills Neighborhood - after dinner I spent an hour walking around my neighborhood, both to cover more distance and to keep my legs from locking up. I had actually expected to do more neighborhood walks to complete the 50k, especially if there was snow, but knocking off 19 of the 31 miles in one go right at the start made that unnecessary - not to mention that after covering almost 22 miles on Sunday, I was beat.
9.8 Mile Run at Schodack Island State Park - I also expected to do a mix of walks and maybe a run this morning, but one thing I learned how to do reasonably well this fall was run even when my legs were tired and sore right from the start (it's pretty much unavoidable when you do crazy-stupid things like signing up for half marathons both days in a weekend or multiple races on the same day.) And while my pace was even slower than yesterday's 19 miler (and that included plenty of walking on the uphill sections, especially that 3 mile stretch from the Albany trailhead to Delmar) I managed to do all of this morning's miles as a run (albeit a very slow run), starting at 8:39 AM and finishing 2 hr 50 min later - well before my 12:23 PM deadline.
Yes, that adds up to 31.6 mi - a half mile extra. That's due to a combination of the difficulty of covering exact distances when running trails and my own tendency to do a little extra so that there's no doubt that I covered the required distance. I ended up taking 8 hrs 50 min which oddly enough is only 40 min longer than my time for the one 50k race I've done, the Seashore Nature Trail 50k in VA in December 2011. Of course, that one was entirely on trails and I did it in one go, instead of getting a 12 hour break after the first 22 miles.
Most weeks during the school year I cover about 35 miles on foot (the fact that I was doing 45-50 mi weeks on a regular basis this fall may explain part of why this school year has been exhausting...) - during this challenge I covered almost that weekly distance in 24 hours.
And as I noted above - I'm beat. I think I'll take it easy for a couple of days...
2022 Event Totals
Run 38.6 mi, 10 hr 14 min
Bike 0 mi, 0 hr 0 min
Snowshoe 0 mi, 0 min
Kayak 0 mi, 0 hr 0 min
Bike 0 mi, 0 hr 0 min
Snowshoe 0 mi, 0 min
Kayak 0 mi, 0 hr 0 min
STATES: NY
