Mt. Diablo 25K Trail Run - My Day with the Devil

it's no secret that i'm a little bit insane. sure, i function enough to hold down a steady job, keep a home and be a decent parent. but yesterday, i questioned just how firm a grasp on sanity i actually had as i crept slowly toward the top of mt. diablo.



i decided to do the mt. diablo summer trail 25k run because, well, i'd never done it before. (no, i have never jumped off a (big) cliff, and i don't think i need to just because of that...) the event has some special meaning because last year, when i was 4 months pregnant, jenny and i (party of 5!) did the 8K event which was SUPER fun. oh, it was challenging. but fun, nevertheless. faithful readers of this blog might recall that this is where "party of 5!" was coined (for me, pregnant with hana, and jenny, pregnant with the twins). so this year, i decided to come back and do the 25K (evidently despite my better judgement). the 15.5 mile course winds up the side of the mountain, over eagle peak, and into juniper campground (at around the 5 mile mark). there you can load up on aid (in my case it was potato chips, payday bars and ice water) and then make the roughly 2.5 mile climb to the summit of mount diablo.

lest you think that jenny and i set some blistering pace, the leaders of our event, the 25K and of the 50K - yes, it's the 25K course twice, so they run to the summit 2 times(!) - were already passing us heading back down the mountain before we even reached the first aid station, probably when we were at mile 4! oh, there will be no chalice of excellence today.

it is during the 2.5 mile stretch of summit trail that i wanted to throw myself on the ground and cry. it was literally the hardest thing i have ever done. my legs were cramping up so badly that it was hard to bend my knees. labor and delivery does not hold a candle to what my legs felt like (maybe that's because of the epidural - but that's not a bad idea if there is a next time for this particular course). the only thing that stopped me from crying was the fact that i really didn't feel i could afford to lose the fluids. so everytime i'd start, i'd say to myself "oh save it."

once i arrived at the summit and saw the sign they put up there to make sure you go all the way ("I made it") my mood instantly shifted to relief. glenda, who was having a great day, and in a positively jovial mood, ran into some friends at the summit, as she'd inexplicably done all along the trail, and had been up there socializing for several minutes by the time jenny and i crawled in. glenda, who had already been to the top, took the stairs up again to summit with us. so it was a nice moment really.

jenny and i didn't linger at the top. we took it in, but were still in pretty foul moods. we just weren't feeling especially chipper. so while glenda hung back and chatted a little bit longer (not to worry, she caught up to us) jenny and i took off. clearly we were so pissy that we weren't thinking straight. we had an opportunity to refill our water supply at the summit, and i don't know what jenny was thinking, but i was thinking that i just want to get back down to juniper campground and sit down. i mean, it was all downhill right? we can do it... well, not exactly. both jenny and i ran out of water probably about a mile and a half before we reached the aid station. lesson learned. that sucked. and for reference, it took us about just under 2 hours to do that stretch of trail... about 90 minutes of that was going up to the summit.

jenny wasn't having the best day either. for much of the run, her chest hurt and she felt like her lungs were going to jump out of her chest, and not from being out of shape or anything either (cuz she's not... it was weird, but it made her want to take it slow which was more fun for me.) most normal people would be concerned that she was having a coronary. but she was pressing on, so i was too. after all, it was just my legs that hurt.

once we arrived at juniper again, i thought i was going to die. i don't care if i never climb another hill ever in my life, although i was well aware that was not in my immediate future. we hung out, we ate, we watched the front runners in the 50K blister past us (including the leader, who i heard won it in 5:13 or something like that). there was a guy who came into the aid station, he was on his way back up on his 2nd lap, and said "i'm in trouble, i feel drunk". i felt pretty bad, but i was not as bad off as that guy. and given that people stopped paying attention to us, and were smartly focussing on that guy (who eventually did finish maybe 30 minutes after us!) i decided it was time to get this thing over with.

the run down the last 5 miles was prehaps the most humbling in some ways. despite the fact that it was almost all down hill or flat my legs were still cramping a little bit so it was painful. in many parts of the downhill, it was too steep to walk and i found that if i threw my chest out in front of me, and ran, gravity would carry me and after a minute or so, it hurt less. so we were able to run about 2 miles and i started to feel hopeful that i could be done with all this soon and run most of the way home.


but then we hit the flats. my guess is that the last 2-2.5 miles is flat and i tell you, i could not will my knees up high enough to manage a run, except periodic bursts to catch up to jenny. at one point it did ask "this will end, won't it?" to which jenny reassured me that yes, it will be over at some point, maybe soon. that last stretch took FOR-EVER! but at last, we finished. over all i think it took us just over 6 hours.


i said going into this that i think people do these runs, not for how you feel while doing it, but how you feel driving away from it like "holy crap, i just did that!!!" being able to talk about it in the past tense is very gratifying.

p.s. once again, there are no pictures of this momentous occaision. that's probably a good thing. it wasn't pretty. i looked like i smelled, which was baaaa-aaad. but you really only want to see the kid anyway, right?