Dick Collins Firetrails 50, Part 1

I've wanted to do this race for years.

When Firetrails 50 first came onto my radar around 2007, I knew all of nothing about ultramarathons, but I definitely knew about the trails in the east bay hills, and I was no stranger to covering long, long distances.  Five years earlier, I had spent four months walking from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail, a hike that made such a profound impression on me that scarcely a day went by that I did not think of the trail.  Sometimes the thoughts were fleeting impressions.  Other times they were the product of full-blown nostalgia for the ground I walked and people I'd met along the way.

In college I would occasionally hike, bike, or even run the trails in Tilden Park in Berkeley, but the PCT experience made me look at those smae trails differently.  Now, the prospect of just taking the trails for as long as my body would carry me seemed not only possible, but very, very compelling.

While training for a half-ironman triathlon, I ran across the website for the race, and something about it called to me.  The simplicity, the welcoming tone of the info about the race, the beautiful photos of trails I had not visited in years... and the prospect of going 50 miles.  More importantly, there was something missing from the description of the event.  There was no mention about this being tough, or that its participants were anything other than normal people.  No macho poses, no "m-dot" tattoos (more on that topic later -- nothing substantive, just opinionated ranting).

You don't see many of these at an ultra!

Short story, I trained for the tri, did it, then did the Death Ride, and knew FT was not in the cards, so I signed up for the Skyline 50k.  I was hooked.  I had a great time, and I quickly gave up on training.  The experience of running trails along ridgelines and in redwood forests with wonderful people completely soured me on the notion of running alone, on concrete, at night in San Francisco.

Flash forward 4 years, now with two kids, and a commute to a new job in the south bay, increasingly out of shape, stuck in that loop of knowing that regular exercise would give me more energy, but lacking the energy to regularly exercise.

"Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger." -- Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now

Next: A (brief) return to running.