Sunday: 17 miles
Saturday was race day at the Bohemian Alps up by Brainard. The whole day was a pretty awesome experience.
The race starts right outside the race director's (Dale's) house. There were maybe 25 people there. I spotted the eventual winner immediately -- an intense guy wearing a Grateful Dead shirt. He jetted from the start and won by at least 10 minutes (4:10, I think). He was obviously sizing up his competition before the start and when he made eye contact with me I gave him the "please don't hurt me" look. I was groggy and not even thinking about "racing."
I ran a 5:23, and honestly I ran harder than I wanted to, as this was supposed to be a relaxed training run. But the course was so varied and so fun, and the weather was so cool that I couldn't resist picking up the pace for a few stretches. In spite of the chill I got really hot, and I wound up as the only runner not wearing a shirt. I got laughed at a lot for that. I also got burned in spite of the heavy cloud cover.
The course was the best I've run. In my (very limited) experience, it was a cross between a harder version of the Heartland 50 miler and a slightly easier version of the Rockin' K marathon. The road was almost always up and down, never level -- through the whole race there were maybe six miles of flats. Everything else was either hills or offroad on a horse trail paralleling the limestone bike path. The trail portions weren't as steep as Rockin' K, with mild technical portions.
Water was in pretty good supply along the route but I found myself wishing more of the jugs had contained Gatorade, and there weren't as many snacks as I expected. Fortunately, Rebecca was there with everything I needed.
All in all, this is (surprisingly) the most fun I've had at a race. And it's 30 minutes from home! That's so cool.
Along the way, we ran through Loma, which isn't on the map. Fairly bizarre place plunked off of the highway, and it has a saloon -- the Bar-M Corral. I thought I had already frequented every local establishment just north of Branched Oak, but I had no idea this place even existed. The town (maybe 30 people?) certainly can't support a local business so they must draw locals from Brainard.
The whole place was suspiciously, eerily atmospheric and I had to do some research to put all of the pieces together. I've been to a lot of small towns but they never exude this much character in the span of two blocks.
After some googling, I found that the Patrick Swazye/Wesley Snipes flick "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar" was filmed in Loma in 1995. Bits of the set still remain, which add to the weird visual juxtaposition of stumbling upon an unmapped town in nowhere, Nebraska.
Weirdness rules.
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