Ultra - Crazy Stuff

Last night, I was able to snatch the POWER (remote control) away from Terry for a couple of minutes... Poor TV is always locked on HGTV. Anyways, I switched to the weather channel so I knew what kind a attire was appropriate for today. On the Weather Channel they showed a special called "Surviving Death Valley" about the Badwater Ultramarathon.

I think I mentioned before, that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the marathon* distance, but everything longer than the 26.2 is completely insane to me. Of course, I acknowledge that my boundaries of things that are doable or not doable for me change on a daily basis, but that marathon thing still strikes me as not for me. I admire everyone that puts her/himself through this and we all know that the marathon is just the icing on a cake of long, hard and consistent workout months. But going longer that this?

*Seriously, the only two things that keep me from attempting an Ironman is 1) the time needed for training and 2) that you have to do a marathon at the end.

I won't... But people do it... And I actually think it's fascinating. Now doing an Ultra (any distance over 26.2) is one thing... Doing Badwater and such is a completely different number! Seriously... Not only is it 135 miles, in the heat of summer in the DESERT(!), but the cherry on top is the killer elevation change of 8,642 total ascent. Like the first two premises don't suck enough! And the current course record is 26:51:33 for women (by Jamie Donaldson) which translates to an average pace of a little under a 12 minute/ mile. Taking into account that even ultra marathoner have to eat every now and then and use the bushes and stuff... That means when she was running, she was actually running faster than her race average. Oh... And while we speaking of it... I guess these super humans don't nap while they race, but does anyone know for sure??

Fascinating right? What the human body is capable to endure is really AMAZING!!!



On top of everything else, it's not like a big prize purse is waiving at the athletes to go through all of this... The prize money is a BELT BUCKLE. That belt buckle business is pretty common for ultra races... I wonder where that is coming from...

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Also last night, I saw that the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour is returning to Greenville for two showings (March 26th and 27th) at the Camelot Cinemas. We went there last year and really enjoyed it, so we are planning on going again and you should too. The tickets are 10 bucks, they raffle off tons of nice stuff (at least they did last year), the crowd is fun and I am sure the films are going to be GREAT.