Ashland Whistle Stop Marathon Report (Read 500 times)

It was an eight and a half hour drive to Ashland WI for this race and the weather on the way up was a “nice” mixture of rain, sleet, snow and constant heavy winds. Fortunately the weather calmed down for race day, with the heavy snow hitting about 30 minutes to the east . The temperature was about 33F and the winds were at 15-20 mph from the west, since the course was a point to point running west to east, the wind direction was nice. The course is an old railroad bed and is now “paved” with a kind of small gravel. Race organizers said the trail was in very good shape. I went into this race with a strained hamstring. While the trail was nice, I found that only the right hand side, about 24” wide or so was hard packed. The rest was pretty soft and really tore up my hamstring. I won’t go into all of the little details of my trials and tribulations during the race, since that would be too long and boring. I will just say that just after mile 14, my hamstring and ankle (not sure what I did to the ankle) were so sore that I actually stumbled while trying to bring the leg forward to continue running. I decided that was enough; I would stop at 15. When I got to that point I couldn’t find any volunteers to tell I was done. So I decided I would stop at 16. I tried several times during that last mile to figure out how I could get 10.2 more miles in, but I knew there was no way . About 100 yards or so from mile 16 I noticed a race photographer sitting in the path with his big camera. I decided there was no way I was getting my picture taken while walking. I continued walking toward him and as he raised his camera, I started “running”; he took the picture, put the camera down and just shook his head. I laughed and went back to a walk as soon as he had lowered his camera. He said are you done. I said yep. He laughed and said thought so. I went to the drop vehicle, got my ride back to town and waited at the finish line for my wife who came in at 3:50:06. I would recommend this race as it is very pretty, mostly flat with a slight downhill slant to it, it’s well organized, there is pretty good support out on the trail and in town around the finish it’s awesome.