Bad Marsh is seven laps on a flat 4.5 mile golf cart path where the asphalt has been

removed.  Mostly grassy with sandy patches.  

The race started at 6:00pm with a temperature of 90F and 84% humidity.

I ran most of the first four laps with runnerclay (good job Ron) and time passed quickly.  

At the time I thought that I was starting slow enough as to be able to hold the pace through out

but that wasn't to be the case.

Once it was full dark nothing was quick for me   I fell a few times though not nearly

as many as my last 50k!    Being saturated with sweat and falling in sand--yuk.  

Even had sand in my teeth.  Yum   

After falling I was more cautious.  That combined with much tiredness setting in, I

slowed considerably.   I did lots of walking the last two laps due to tiredness and fear

of more falling.  

I saw a couple of baby, pencil sized snakes after dark.  I guess that they were wanting to

suck the heat out of the sand.   Others said that they saw some larger ones.

There were lots of frogs croaking and whippoorwills sounding off.  The stars were beautifully bright.

I didn't think that my light was that great to begin with but some time after six hours it really dimmed.

Not wanting to stop to change the batteries I kept going but even more slowly.  The last couple miles

or so a guy who came up from behind with a very bright Petzl light ran with me most of the way in.  Thanks guy!

Over all it was a good race.  I just wasn't prepared for the whole running in the dark thing.   And I'm

not sure that I'll be jumping to do that again very soon.

Bad Marsh was a very well run / organized race.  The men manning the aid station were johnny

on the spot getting our water bottles filled for us very quickly instead of us having to do it.   

Speaking of which,  two 10oz water bottles wasn't enough for me per 4.5 mile lap!

MTA: Time 6:46.