6 Hours of Turning Left

There are some somewhat obvious pros and cons to the race — on the pro side, you’re never far from aid and have basically constant access to a bathroom, water, and drop bag and can get away with carrying almost nothing throughout the race. On the con side, you’re running in a small loop (the race I did was a tiny bit over one mile) and when you get tired you can’t even motivate yourself to go faster because that won’t actually allow you to finish any sooner. There were a bunch of things that were also a surprise to me as well.

Early on, I found it amazing how you can be surrounded by runners and yet still feel totally alone. I’m sure my experience would have been different if I had friends running the race as well, but that wasn’t the case. I was surrounded by people doing the same crazy thing that I was and yet I didn’t know any of them — none of them were cheering me on. Normally in an ultra, I would say good job to anyone who passed me (in the same or opposite direction), but I almost immediately realized that this becomes much stranger in a race like this because you might see someone as often as every 5–10 minutes and saying good job or hi that often to someone you don’t know is a LOT. I did find that by the end of the race, there were a few people who I had started to smile at or say hi to but still not quite every time I saw them, and it was still largely a big group of strangers.

I had thought that there would be a big party at the finish line — after all, everyone finishes at the same time, right? I was surprised by the fact that there were a number of people who stopped early. They had a goal distance going into the race and when they reached that distance, they stopped. I mean, kudos to them for still participating — many of them still went far, but it just didn’t match my expectations. Additionally, this year we were impacted by the weather. It was raining, windy and cold, so like basically everyone else, I wanted to change into dry clothes as soon as possible and generally do everything I could to stay out of the elements as soon as I finished. I did get a chance to chat with a few of the other women who finished near the top like I did, but there was less of a finish line party than basically any of the other races that I’ve done (again, I’m sure the rain was a huge factor).

I had sort of assumed that everyone would truly be trying to go as far as they could in the time allotted (like I was), and there certainly were a bunch of people doing that. What I didn’t quite account for was that there were also a bunch of people with totally different goals. There was one woman, for example, who was out there to run a marathon. She was talking about how she had run one marathon before, but couldn’t quite make the cutoff and only got a medal because a volunteer had stayed behind at the finish line. I realized that if you’re someone like her, a race like this is a great way to be able to run a particular distance (like a marathon) without having to worry about a cutoff time or closed aid stations. There would be people around until you finished. I thought it was actually really cool how friendly the race was to people of all ability levels.

I had expected it to be easy to tell how I was doing relative to others. After all, you’re all near each other and in theory, they could have standings listed. In fact, they did have a large computer screen with current results available on each loop but it was really hard to read and I couldn’t find any easy to digest info on it other than how many loops behind the leader I was (which, as a woman, told me nothing about how I was doing relative to the other women). The top man was killing me, but I could have told you that just based on how he looked running out there.

They also let people run the loop in either direction and to switch directions at any time, which made it even harder to tell where I was. I knew that no women passed me for probably the first 3/4 of the race, but they could have been going faster in the opposite direction and I wouldn’t have known. There were also several who passed me in the last hour or so of the race but I had no idea if I was so far ahead of them already that it didn’t matter or if they had just passed me to beat me out. As it turned out, I finished as the first woman and sixth overall, but I really thought there was a good chance I was the 4th or 5th woman.

The monotony of the loop was actually way less bad than I was expecting. Despite the fact we could run in either direction, I ran the same direction for the entire race. In part, I did that because I wasn’t 100% sure how to deal with the timing mats when I turned around — did I cross them twice in a row? Did I not? As my friend teased me, it was just like me to avoid a couple of minutes of awkward questions with six hours of turning left.

Anyway, while I wouldn’t say that the course was riveting and there certainly weren’t hills to help with motivation, I also wasn’t bored out of my mind — there were the other racers, not to mention other runners/walkers/cyclists/horse police in addition to my own thoughts to keep me occupied. There were views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, puddles to avoid and weather to contend with. There was something a little comforting about knowing what was coming and not worrying at all about getting lost. When I was feeling tired at the start/finish, it was a little bit easier to push myself into the next lap knowing that I just had one mile before I could be back there again. I could do a mile. A mile isn’t hard.

I totally sandbagged at the end. There was this moment when I realized that if I pushed myself a little I could do 7 more laps and if I didn’t, I could get 6. I got through about half of the first of those and was slower than the pace I needed and I made the decision to only do 6. At that point, I only actually needed to average about a 12-minute mile for those 6 laps. Once I knew that, it was really hard to motivate myself to do anything much faster than a 12-minute mile. The only thing going a little faster was going to get me was to allow me to finish a couple minutes earlier which seemed hardly worth it to my tired brain and tired body. Unlike my usual finish kick, I just sort of jogged it in. In fact, I met another woman on the final part of my final lap who was worried about meeting the cutoff, I knew we had minutes to spare, so I assured her we were more than fine and chatted with her on our way in. In a normal race, I wouldn’t have done that — she would be dead to me at that point. There’s no way my competitive streak would have let me run with her much less talk to her that late in a race.

Overall, I’m not sure I’ll go out of my way to find another timed race, but I also wouldn’t say no to one either. I think it would be a fun experience if I were to convince some friends to also run it with me next time. The race was both similar to my expectations and at the same time, totally different. I completed 38 miles (37 laps) in just under 6 hours, which I was very happy with. Cheers to everyone else who braved the rainy weather with me — life is a series of experiences and this certainly was a good one.

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