Wishing our intrepid racers great fun!

From the Master Intrepid Racing calendar:

06/14 - 06/15 TammyinGP - Wild Rogue Relay, Southern Oregon

06/15 tetsujin - Rattlesnake Ridge Half Marathon (Marathon Monk straw sandals)

We are looking forward to reading the details of your race adventure.

Posie

Anzlo, very, very nice!   That's a terrific plan and a terrific outcome!    Well done, very happy for you.   Hope you are encouraged, you should be.   and winning the AG to boot!! 

Very happy for you!!  Way to go.

Joe

This RR would be different if I'd bother to prepare

better but I just like to see how good/bad I can do as is.

It's probably not too late to change but I don't want to.

Makes me admire those of you who do prepare even more.

.

Rattlesnake Ridge Half Marathon

5:30am / June 15, 2019 / Issaquah, WA

barefoot jon (76) - Marathon Monk straw zori
4:08:56.5 (19:01m/m) . . . vs. 5hr cutoff (22:55m/m).
O/A - 82/83
♂ - 45/46
AG - 1/1

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• Tadao Suzuki RunnerPhoto pics (mile 1 and finish)
  

  
  

  

First trail race in three years after being so slow at 8:16:36 in the Mt. Taylor Marathon in 2016 that I gave up the trail racing I used to love and started thinking about regular hiking as an alternative excuse for getting up onto the nearby foothills of the Cascade Mountains. In this regard, though, except for annual three hour, late-summer, drives with DW to Paradise Lodge at the 5,000' level on Mt. Rainier and hiking four miles up to Camp Muir (10,000') or, in more recent years, short hikes around lower base trails with their spectacular Rainier views, I never had much interest in the nearby local trails with such high timberlines up to 4-5,000' thwarting the kind of alpine experience and vistas overlooking glaciers, fjords, lakes and forests I was used to from growing up a little southeast of erika-land with more accessible 1,800' timberlines of the more northern climes.
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However, one of the hikes with somewhat of a view (weather permitting, down the Snoqualmie Valley to Puget Sound) that I’ve liked down here was the 2-mile trek from Rattlesnake Lake (about 30 miles east of Seattle at exit 32 of I-90) up to the cliffs of the Rattlesnake Ledges.  I’d often looked up to the Ledges over the years in several marathons and ultras that cross through the Rattlesnake Lake picnic/campgrounds but only made the hike myself for the first time last fall. I liked it so much even thought about doing it as many times as possible in one day.  Therefore, I signed up right away when I saw that the cutoff for a Rattlesnake Ridge Half Marathon was a generous five hours, a 22;55 pace that, depending on terrain and steepness, I was easily maintaining on most of my recent hike-running.

In particular, on power hikes up to the ledges and running down, I’d often thought about continuing on up above the ledges onto the Rattlesnake Ridge Trail but time had never permitted.  Therefore, it would be interesting to be coming from the other end of the ridge from down I-90 at Snoqualmie Point Park at Exit 27, eventually reaching the ledges at mile 8.5 of the race for a two mile descent down to the lake and final 1.5 mile out-and-back on the Iron Horse Rails-to-Trails I’ve run parts of many times, e.g. in several of the Snoqualmie Tunnel Marathons, a century 100K, etc. .

Starting at 5:30am (to avoid most of the morning/afternoon hikers) in a morning marine layer concealing the rising sun on Saturday, June 15, runners were immediately greeted with dozens of short, sharp pitches but they were only about a block or two long and, instead of the steep ascents I expected to be necessary to get up to the altitude of the ledges, we were mostly running on long, gentle traverses through old logging second-growths still featuring so many branches and snags from more than a hundred years ago that there was little room for new, green, early-summer, underbrush, just bare brown, pine-needled ground full of logging debris with the only greenery being the flowers and weeds on two transmission line cuts each about 1/4 mile wide. It sure would not have been characterized as the “scenic area” noted on USGS maps if it’d been up in erika-land,
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Though we really hadn’t seemed to have ascended that much yet, what a relief it was when the trail started descending at six miles and, because I’m still pretty good on the downhills, my pace picked up from the barely minimum 21-22m/m clockings for the first six miles needed to finish w/i the five hour deadline to a speedy 15-16m/m.  However, when my MapMyRun app was indicating the easy descending was extending well into seven miles, I started worrying about how steep a climb back up to the Rattlesnake Ledges at 8.5 miles was in store for me up ahead. At eight miles, the worrying was more like panic about the impending climb to the ledges that would probably erase any time advantage so far over the dreaded five hour cut-off when, all-of-a-sudden, voila, at 8.5 miles, there were the Ledges, not high above me as feared but right down below me and the two mile descent to the lake was quickly under my feet.

It was a delight coming down from the Rattlesnake Ledges on the familiar descent filling with upcoming hikers wondering what was going on and on to the lake and then, still running all the way, the mile-and-half out-and-back on the familiar Iron Horse Trail  

At a 4:08:56.5 finish and unbelievable, for me, 19:01 average pace, I not only finished 52 minutes ahead of the five hour cutoff but also avoided my accustomed DGL <<<(“dead-glorious-last&rdquo>>> albeit only ahead of one other 52-yo runner and two runners in their thirties with the ignominious DNF’s this time.

As if anything could top that off, got an AG award entry into one of the summer’s Cougar Mountain Running Series I’d given up more than ten years ago when it started becoming so embarrassing to have become so slow in trail races I used to run with ease.

Not anymore!
                        
In addition, a raffle prize auto waxing kit that DW’s car needed helped make up the missing time from the usual domestic chores every Saturday morning.

Yippee.        
No wonder I love running so much.

ps - not having purchased running shoes since 1990, I had no problem running the Rattlesnake in the same Japanese straw zori (thongs) from many trail marathons and ultras of the past with their durable hard-rubber soles I’d purchased during one of my several outings up Mt. Hiei of Marathon Monk fame near Kyoto.

Awesome, Tet, you are an inspiration!   Way to go!!