Swimrun Casco Bay 2023 race report.

When Trista realized she wouldn't be able to come down for Bandera, Tejas Trails said they were happy to transfer her registration to another upcoming Tejas Trails race. We looked at our options, and the two that might have worked, schedule-wise, were J&J (formerly Nueces) and this weird new race called Spider Mountain. After offering both things up as possibilities to Coach Kristen, she selected Spider Mountain. The only thing left was to select which event in particular at Spider Mountain to do. There's a group of set-distance events: 4, 8, and 12 miles. And then there's a group of timed events: 6 hours, 9 hours, and 12 hours. We figured it might make sense to do something like the 12 mile, then maybe also the 4 mile? Get some good distance in on the hills? Or maybe the 6 hour event, which would be much longer than we've trained up to, but a nice stretch. Coach said we should do the 9 hour. Oh shit. Here's what we knew about Spider Mountain going in. It's a looped course, 4.3 miles each loop, and each loop has two massive ascents and two massive descents. For the timed races, you just do as many loops as you can during the time you're allotted. And because Spider Mountain is normally a mountain bike park, there's a chair lift, which you're allowed to use twice during the 9 hour event, either going up or going down, whichever you choose. Oh, and also it's a night race, starting at 7pm.

Headlamps required! 

 Trista's first night race, Trista's first night trail run, and if things went well, Trista's first ultra. AND amazingly, the first run event Trista and I would ever do together! We've done swimruns, and we've done the same triathlons, though not "together", but we'd not yet managed to actually ever do a run together. Running a tough trail together in the dark for 9 hours seemed like a good way to see if our relationship could survive something as hard as Rockman!

Gotta wear our dorky shirts whenever we're together, man. 

And as a delightful bonus, Matt decided to go out with us! He signed up for 6 hours of running and 3 hours of taking care of us when he was done running.

 

My favorite. 

We drove out to Burnet mid afternoon on Saturday, arriving a little early, basically just as packet pickup was beginning. That gave us a chance to set up our stuff in a premium location and then stroll the grounds a little, checking out the course. Beautiful venue! We got to enjoy it as the sun went down before the race, then never again. 

As we were picking up our packets, Trista snuck a look at the registration sheet, which she said seemed to imply there were only 9 people doing the 9 hour race. Tiny field, but given how undertrained for 9 hours we were, and how tough the course was, we really didn't get our hopes up about placing. Then Trista noticed that she'd completely misread the sheet, and that it implied there were exactly 2 people signed up for the 9 hours. Presumably.. that was me and Trista. Well, we can CERTAINLY manage to podium under those circumstances! Of course, we had no idea if we were reading it right, and probably more people would sign up on race day, so we just kinda laughed about it and continued getting ready.

Initially she thought that bibs 30-39 meant there were 9 people registered.

It was COLD. From looking at the forecast, we expected it to start a little warm, then cool down as the sun went down. I expected to wear a short sleeved shirt, and maybe later in the night put on a long sleeved shirt over it. But while we sat there chatting, we were FREEZING. I put on my long sleeved shirt, and then my puffy jacket over that, and I was VERY reluctant to take off the puffy jacket when it got to be race time. So cold. But I took off the puffy jacket and started in short sleeve+long sleeve.

 

Start line! Freezing! 

All of the timed races started together, and certainly when we lined up for our 7pm start, there weren't that many people total in all 3 timed races. A good turnout for a first year race with a very bizarre premise/venue, though, and presumably there was another similar group of distance-based racers starting half an hour later. The race began, and we headed out for our 9 hour adventure! Since this is a looped course, I'll go ahead and describe loop 1, which will describe the course, and then after that give some bullet points of things I remember from subsequent loops. It all gets a little blurry at 2am in the dark on a mountain on our "do you have any idea which loop we're on?!" loop. There's a little bridge at the start, but we started on the FAR side of that bridge, so we didn't immediately sink the poor thing. We ran through the grass alongside the lake, trying not to run into big landscaping rocks or run through the firepits spaced along the lake.

 

We ran across this bridge every time EXCEPT the very start, then ran along the water there.

Oh, I should mention that I had this image of us running the first loop while the sun was still up, and getting some idea of what everything looked like. I forgot how early the sun goes down in mid February. Turns out: before 7pm. It was dark already when we started. The course cuts a sharp left onto a paved road and heads uphill. We slowly ran some of that hill, walked some of it. Everyone settled into their paces, passing and being passed. The road turned right, and then we were at the beginning of the first ascent, and onto the trail. I was no longer freezing. This trail, you guys. We had no idea what to expect. We knew it was supposed to be pretty hilly, and people threw out words like "double black diamond", which really didn't have any meaning for me. They did say during the pre-race meeting that there would probably be a lot of hiking on this section.

 

There Were No Easy Trails

First let me just say, regarding the entire 4.3 mile loop, that it was not technical. At all. Because it's a mountain bike course, it's very smoothed out, not a whole lot of rocks, no ledges or steps. Very few trip hazards other than your own feet. But what it lacked in technicality, it made up for in pretty much absolutely no flats. And this first ascent was by far the hardest part. Trista led, and she followed the lead of the people ahead of us, running what they ran and walking when they walked. And as I've noted in every swimrun we've done, Trista is a much more aggressive starter than I am. She's all excited and eager and fast at the beginning, and I just try to keep her in view until she burns through that initial energy and settles into a calmer pace. Trying to keep up with her on this first ascent almost killed me. I can't even describe some of the grades on the first ascent. We'd step one foot up, and then have to pause and make sure we didn't slide back down before bringing the other foot up to meet it. There were some spots with trees on the side of the path, and in those cases we just grabbed the tree and dragged ourselves up with our arms. At least then we didn't feel like we were gonna slide our way back down to the bottom again. Or off the side into "who knows how far this cliff drops off, because it's really dark out here". Meanwhile our calves felt like they were going to just explode, because of the angle of the path. Also I was REALLY REALLY not freezing anymore. I was overheating massively. It was incomprehensible to me that I was fearing hypothermia not 20 minutes earlier. But hey, we were walking anyway, so I handed my pack to Trista, took off my long sleeved shirt, and tied it around my waist. Whew. All better. So yes.. there was a lot of hiking on the first ascent. But on our first loop, still some running. "Running". The first ascent eventually blissfully opens up onto the mountain top, where there is an aid station, and you'd like to celebrate, except that that calf-destroying journey straight up the side of a mountain only got you 0.8 miles into your loop. How is that even possible?! The course is marked with a "first descent" sign where you're supposed to go next, but .. again, it's dark up there, and confusing, and I think nearly every time we came through (twice per loop!), we basically just looked at the volunteers in confusion and they told us where to go next. We weren't super bright to start out, and we got progressively dumber the later it got and the more we ran. (The volunteers out there were amazing, especially the ones who sat around in the cold at the top of a mountain for hours.) First descent was .. uneventful. Honestly, it's the least notable part of the loop for me. It's longer than the first ascent. It's got some steep bits that are hell on the quads. But it's runnable and it's over fairly quickly. I was very glad it was longer than the first ascent, because descending on the same grades as that ascent would be both frightening and painful. The added distance lets them flatten it out a little bit. The main notable part of the first ascent for me is that it dumps you back onto the road not too far from where the first ascent started. And for some reason that surprised me EVERY TIME. I'd expect it to put us over by the chair lift, and each time I'd be like "Ohyeah! We have to run over to the chair lift now!" See above: not real bright. This next part between ascent/descents is the only real flat part of the course. It's like a little transition. A chance to catch your breath between challenges. In the pre-race speech, the RD said they had a marked a trail on this section to run on, that's sort of just off the road, but that if we WANTED to run on the road, we could. He said why would you want to run on the road if you signed up for a trail race? So we dutifully ran over on the trail toward the chair lift/2nd ascent, and I promptly caught my toe on something and stretched my stupid dumb problematic hamstring out painfully. It was just an awkward trail that wasn't super well marked and had a little too much camber, so Trista gamely let me drag us up to the road and do the rest of that run on the road. And honestly it was a little refreshing. Yes, it's not super fun to run the road in trail shoes. And yes, we paid for a trail race and were running on the road. But after staring at your feet nonstop on the trail, it's nice to look up for a while and look around you (at the nothing in the dark). It's nice to just zone out for a couple minutes. It's nice to raise your average pace by a couple seconds per mile briefly. So we actually ended up running the road every time we went down this stretch (two times per loop). At first it was just us on the road, and everyone else was over on the trail. By the last few hours we were out there, everyone had started using the road, as well. The road took us to the chair lift, aka the beginning of the 2nd ascent.

"Ignore if not participating in a Tejas Trails event. 

 We had a choice here at the chair lift. If you were doing one of the distance races (4,8,12 miles), you were not allowed to use the chair lift. If you were doing the 6 hour race, you could use the chair lift once, meaning you could either ride it up once, or down once. Those of us doing the 9 or 12 hour races could use it a total of two times. Two times up, or two times down, or one up and one down. With the caveat that the chair lift shut down at midnight, so you had to use it before then or not at all. We discussed beforehand, but really didn't come up with any sort of plan or strategy for the chair lift. It was more of a thing to do if you were trying to win by getting in more loops than anyone else. There were smart times to use it and unwise times to use it, or you could let your body decide when it needed a break and use it then. We were out there to get in as many miles as possible on our feet, so it didn't make a whole lot of sense for us to use it. But it also sounded sorta fun and unique. So we just put the concept in our back pocket and figured if we decided while out there to do it, we'd do it. We had a 2 seconds discussion wherein we decided this wasn't the time to do it. (We actually kinda hoped, back before I forgot it would already be dark at 7pm, that we could use it before the sun went down, so we could SEE the pretty view, but that was obviously a non-starter of an idea.)

The chair lift during the day, when you can actually see it exists. 

So we started up the 2nd ascent. This ascent was longer than the 1st ascent, and also significantly less steep. It had parts that you could actually run, between the steeper parts that you either couldn't or that you probably shouldn't, if you planned to be out there a while. We ran the runnable parts, hiked the steeper parts, and made it back up to the mountaintop aid station again. The volunteers pointed us to the 2nd descent trailhead, and we headed down toward the end of our first loop! This section was the longest of the 4 ascent/descents, I think maybe 1.2ish miles total? Because it was longer but got us back to the same place, it was more gradual (a LOT more gradual than first ascent, and still significantly more gradual than the other ascent and descent), but that also means it felt like it took a lot longer to get through it. Lots of downhills into sharp right turns, and one kinda terrible section of ledges that really seemed like it should have a good path through, but if it did, we never managed to find it in our many passes through. The 2nd descent ends in a flatter trail that runs next to the road we drove in on, and then a series of bridges in the trees, ultimately putting us back at the chair lift and the road. Another chance to run either road or trail back the way we'd come earlier, half a mile back toward the start/finish line. Then back down the hill we'd come up, through the grass and fire pit hazards, across the little bridge where we started, and then up some unkind stone steps to the timing mat. Done with 1 loop! It was only 4.3 miles, but it felt like it had taken HOURS. Looking at our watches, it had taken us basically 1 hour. 1 down, 8 to go. This was gonna be a long, long night. Okay, so that's the course. It remained constant the next 8 hours, and the only thing that changed was us. Here's other stories in bullet points. - We did all of our refilling at the start/finish line aid station. We usually drank some of our mini Cokes, refilled water if necessary (I had bottles, so refilled more often, Trista had a water bladder, so only refilled twice, I think?). We also restocked our Gu each loop, and swapped out head lamps or batteries if necessary.

 

Refilled, restocked, and took selfies. -

Speaking of Gu, we decided to use my standard "Gu every 40 minutes" strategy, because I know the math for that so well. That's a LOT of Gu, and this was a great chance to practice keeping up with a nutrition schedule when your body really doesn't want to cram down any more calories. I had plenty of practice with that, as a person who managed to still be taking gels on a schedule in the last hours of a 100 miler, but Trista was quickly indoctrinated into the horror of "Really?! Has it really already been 40 minutes and I have to take another one?! I feel like I JUST finished eating one!" To her credit, she did amazing. I mean, we complained each and every time, but she's the one who actually kept us on our schedule and watched her watch to note when we had to eat again. She also experienced the same thing I do in endurance racing, where after lots of hours, you start to feel hungry, even if you're spot on your nutrition schedule. It's a scary feeling, and I usually interpret it to mean that I need to eat some solid food that causes more satiation than just gelled sugar. - The first time that Trista felt hungry, I mentioned that she should try eating something more solid the next chance we had. A few minutes later, we got up to the mountaintop aid station, and had some real food choices there. Not great ones, but some. I grabbed a handful of Pringles. Trista got.. a pickle. She got a pickle most times we went through that aid station, and then spent a few minutes of the descent telling me how great the pickle was. I told her maybe pickles weren't the BEST choice for calories and satiation, clocking in at like 10 calories. - Actually, her very first pickle, as much as she loved it, she couldn't eat the whole thing. She asked if it was wrong to throw the rest of the pickle into the trees on the side of the trail, and we decided that it would get eaten by the bears that Trista was convinced were out there, and from then on we referenced PickleBears any time we heard weird noises. - The chair lift makes really weird noises, especially when you can't see that it's there, flying over you in the dark. - Fairly sure the weather remained pretty constant the whole race, mid 50s. After I took off my long sleeved shirt, I never (mostly, foreshadowing) regretted it, and was comfortable the rest of the time. Trista was mostly comfortable, but each time we started our 2nd descent on a loop, her hands got cold and she wanted gloves. And then by the time we got back to our stuff at the start/finish line, she either didn't need them anymore, or just got all caught up in restocking stuff and forgot. Until the next time we were running the 2nd descent. Every. Single. Time. - Combining the last 2 bullet points... on loop #(no idea, we never, ever knew which loop we were on), Trista realized it was getting near midnight, and if we were gonna do the chair lift, we should do it soon, before it shut down. The RD had explained that it was not a good idea, logistically, to use the chair lift for first ascent or first descent, because you'd have to add distance to your run to get to the lift itself, and then from the lift back to where you needed to be. So that left 2nd ascent or 2nd descent. I suggested 2nd descent, to give our quads a break, but Trista wanted 2nd ascent, so on that loop, we ran up to the chair lift and said "Okay! Uh, what do we do?" First they marked our bibs off as having used the chair lift once. Or rather, they marked Trista's bib. My bib was on my long sleeved shirt, which was back at the start/finish line with my stuff. Oops. Fortunately there were so few people out there, the volunteers all recognized us as having come through a billion times together, knew we hadn't used the lift, and just marked Trista's bib and let me through with her. We managed to get scooped up by the next chair that was built for humans and not mountain bikes, and then we were headed up! Probably! It was really dark, so we couldn't see anything at all! And it was really, really, really cold! Pretty immediately the novelty wore off, and we just settled into complaining piteously about how freakin' cold it was up there. And trying to take pictures and videos, which we never really mastered while wearing headlamps. And then distracting ourselves by trying to see when people were going DOWN the chair lift next to us, and complaining to THEM about how cold we were. We decided they needed a coat or blanket distribution center at the top and bottom, which you could return when you got to your destination. It was a really, really long chair lift ride in the still-probably-55-degree-weather that we were pretty sure was going to cause hypothermia, and solidly cemented our decision to NOT use our second chair lift opportunity. Glad we did it, though! #yolo

This was the most successful of our 10 attempts. - 

When we got off the chairlift at the mountaintop aid station, we REALLY had no idea where we were, because we'd never been on this corner of the mountaintop, so we yelled out hoping a volunteer would help us figure out where we were and where we needed to go. As he was directing us, he asked if it had been cold out there, so I assume everyone who was using the chairlift was complaining about the cold. - As the night went on, and the morning began, fatigue definitely started to set in. Things that were slight inclines that might have been run earlier became steep hills that were now walked. A lot more walking in the later loops. - We were so consistently cursing the first ascent that finally I decided it needed a name, and that its name was Ted. That allowed us to curse it in a much more individualized and specific way, which led to a constant chorus of "Fuck Ted" as we climbed that ascent. Eventually all running was removed from the first ascent, and it was pure hiking. And after THAT, eventually the hiking sometimes had a break or two, to peer out into the darkness and enjoy the "view". And rest. Fuck Ted. - Trista commentary as she reviews my race report before I post it: "You may mention it later. But remember when you put your hands on my ass and saved me from falling backwards down the mountain on Ted? See? It was steep, man." - The second ascent eventually got a name, too, just because we had nothing better to do, and he was Victor. We told Victor he was far superior to Ted. Except there are a few very steep part of Victor, where we'd be like, "Victor, c'mon. Don't be like Ted, man." - There was a piece of a bike reflector halfway up the first ascent that became our friend about halfway through the race, and we'd greet it each time we went by. - We were not braining at a very high level, and it definitely got worse the later it got. - We ran this loop many times. Many, many times. And each time we did, we found something new. Many new things. Each loop was a chorus of, "Was that there last time!?" and "Well, that's new!" We were pretty convinced that either we were running in different places each time, or that someone was coming and adding things each time we went through. Things like.. rocks, signs, HOUSES. Seriously, that house wasn't there the first 3 loops. - Trista led the whole time (some of the descents and all of the road were wide enough to run two abreast, but the uphill was all singletrack), and she was constantly saying "beady eyes!" and "spider!", but even though she said that dozens of times, I saw exactly one spider. I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt, since the whole place was called Spider Mountain.

We never needed the first aid spiders, fortunately. - 

At one point, they lit a giant bonfire up on the mountaintop. It was pretty, but it also made a pretty intense smoke smell and cloud. Trista commented that she hoped it wasn't the kind of trees that Matt was allergic to, since he'd been telling a story earlier about how campfires from some fires ended up giving him hives. She said she hoped they didn't have to pull him out in an ambulance. I requested we not explore that avenue of thinking. - And then we turned a corner, and there was Matt, at the aid station! Not in an ambulance at all! Doing just fine! It had been ~5 hours since we saw him, so it was nice to be reassured that he was doing fine, and having a good time. As we were heading for 1st descent, he was heading for 2nd descent to finish his last loop and be done. We were maybe a little jealous.

 

Look who we found! - 

But Matt being done meant that the next time we hit the start/finish line, and every time after that, we had a sherpa to help us refill water, change batteries, cater to our every whim, etc. And it gave Matt something to do to kill the 3 hours between our races finishing. Best husband ever.

  Coming up the unkind stone stairs to the start/finish line, taken by Matt after he finished his race. - 

A couple times, we tried and failed to do mid-race math, to figure out how many loops we'd be able to do, and how many miles we were going to end up with. The rules of the race said that for the 9 hour race, you couldn't start another loop if the clock said 8:01. If you came in after 8, your race was over. Originally, when we were still doing 60 minute loops (uh, we only did one of those, actually), I thought maybe we'd do 9 loops. 1 per hour. I realized quickly that wasn't realistic, so we figured 8 loops. Except eventually we realized that unless we ran our 7th loop sub-60, which DEFINITELY wasn't happening at that point, we were gonna end up 7 loops. Which is a lot of miles, and a new distance PR for Trista, but also just tantalizingly shy of the 31 miles of a 50k. So at some point late in the race, I told Trista I was totally in for continuing to run after our race was officially over, to get us to 31 miles. - We had discussed, since it was likely just the two of us, crossing the finish line at the exact same time, so we'd tie, but as we ran in, I hung back and let Trista cross before me. She had forgotten, and then didn't even think about it until later, when I declared her the winner of her first ultra! She was annoyed at me for hanging back, but no regrets. :D - And so, we crossed the finish line after 7 loops, and our race was officially over. Except uh.. there was not a single soul at the start/finish line. We kinda spun around and peered into the darkness, but there was no volunteer at the aid station. There were no spectators around. Matt wasn't there. It was a ghosttown. I mean, to be fair, it was about 3am, and the only people left out on the course were the 12 hour people, and they were coming through so infrequently that volunteers and spectators were keeping warm inside. Finally Matt, a volunteer, and the RD all appeared to congratulate us, and give us our trophies! Because yes, it turns out there were only 3 people doing the 9 hour race, and the other guy had left a while ago. We then had to explain that we weren't really DONE done, as such, so we took off our timing chips, and then headed back out into the darkness, like idiots, to get Trista her first 50k! There was not a chance in hell that we were gonna go meet up with Ted again, so I proposed we just keep it on the road and easy-mode our last 2 miles. That worked out well for a while, but when we got over to the chair lift, the park road becomes a highway, and that definitely wasn't a good idea, even at 3am. So we hopped over onto the trail that runs alongside the road, which is also the end of the 2nd descent, and ran that backward for a while. And very much confused some of the 12 hour folks who were coming in, and thought somehow they were going the wrong way. Since our race was over, we stepped off the trail when others came by, cheering for them, and also stopped to take some pictures, and then eventually stopped at a portapotty.

   

We ran by this 7 times, and didn't notice it until we ran back the OTHER way at the end.

And then finally we got enough mileage that we could head back to the start/finish line, tick Trista's watch over to 31 miles, and be DONE! It was hard as hell, it wasn't comfortable, but it was amazing practice for the suffering that we're going to need to endure at Rockman. It was great hill practice. It was a test of our ability to tolerate each other while suffering and running up hills, and I'm happy to say that we never got testy with each other, we never got angry, and we had fun the entire time.

  First place, so happy to be done!

Oh, and Trista won her very first ultra. So that's pretty cool, too.

  We took this picture as a joke before the race (this podium is by the chair lift, completely unaffiliated with the race). LOOK HOW PRESCIENT WE WERE!

Garmin says 5571 feet of elevation gain. My legs agree.