Cline Buttes 12-Hour Recap
- Bri
- Jun 9
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 23
The plants are starting to droop. It’s been 2-weeks since I’ve watered anything inside the house. When I first moved to Bend, I craved greenery. My yoga room & office was filled to the brim and a goliath bird of paradise was the center piece. Its giant leaves provided a canopy of lusciousness that enveloped me in a sense of returning to the wet side of the state that I still miss. Now, I low-key resent anything that asks me for commitment… even passive plants that need water to survive.
This year has been one of my most challenging for staying my chosen corse of running optimization. After I left Ironman, I promised myself that I’d never go down the soul sucking, rabbit hole of optimization again. Yet, here I am: having run through the snowy and icy winter; having run through the freezing spring; having amassed more than 100 repeats up our local butte. The only reprieve from the optimization mindset is the 10-15 miles that I run with Huck every Saturday. One cannot be loved by Huck and not be completely affected by the joy he emits.
Roughly a week ago, my training culminated in a 12-hour, looped-course race up a local butte. My post-pandemic race anxiety (Ref. 1) craved an event where success could be seen as committing to move for a length of time, whatever that looked like for any of us on that given day (i.e. there really was no DNF). This event also started at 6pm at night, finishing at 6am the next morning, which made it perfect for overnight training prior to my bigger race goals this summer.
First things first, Kelsey of Alpenglow Endurance put on a great event. When I race, I’m looking for a fun route, enough supplies at aid stations for all participants (i.e. if your aid station is empty by the time the mid to back of the packers hit it (*cough*IMTUF*cough*) I’m going to assume your’e a shitty/elitist race director), and the ability to attract great volunteers.
Route: I love a hard course and this 3-mile loop included a 1/2 mile climb at a 33% grade, followed by a cruisy decent, was exactly that.
Aid Station: Supplied the entire event with a selection of warm and cold beverages / food. My only ask would’ve been vegan noodle cups (the selection was obviously much more varied for those eating animal products).
Volunteers: A++. I cannot say enough about the people who supported this event and kept us all going!
As for my race, I started this day with one of my lowest whoop recovery scores in months. The race evening was hot and I did my best to moderate myself when the group went out harder than was ideal for me. After a few loops, I settled into a sustainable pace. It was easy to stay on target for hydration/electrolytes but I struggled to consume the nutrition that I’ve been training with for nearly a year (this happened at Mountain Lakes, too). I quickly started drinking ginger ale, which prolonged my ability to run at my last event. For the middle 6-8 hours, if I ate solid food at the aid station, I found myself nauseous during the climb that was 1/2 a mile from the aid station… only to be ravenous as I ran the cruisy 2-mile decent. It took until my final few loops to make the discovery that I could cary food up the climb (hello, pocket potatoes) to eat on the decent.
My only goal for the event was to move for the entire length of time. Although I did this, I’ve been struggling to find words for why my day (night) left me so unsatisfied. Maybe it’s because I never really felt great in my body (starting with a low recovery and struggling to eat). Maybe it’s because I am still dealing with immense foot / ankle pain on longer distances (the rest of my body felt amazing even at the end of this event). Maybe it’s because I finished my final loop with 40-minutes on the clock (not enough for another loop, meaning that I didn’t necessarily maximize the time available). Maybe it’s because I told myself that success was 'moving'... but I still held an expectation of a mileage goal that I missed. Maybe it’s because, in listening to Rich Roll’s podcast on high-functioning depression, I felt a lot of resonance with the content.
Very little in my life feels right-sized at the moment. I'm ok with being ok and I'm trying not to blow my life up as I look for a thread of joy to show me the way forward. Right now, the only joy I feel is in those precious long runs that I mentioned with Huck. So, that’s what I’ll keep doing, as much as possible, until the rest of the pieces fall back into place. So, I raced for 12-hours… and… well, I was the 3rd place woman for this small, local event (shoutout to Kelsey for recognizing men, women, and non-bianary race categories). I tried to force myself to feel happy about the result, because I knew I ‘should’. Forcing happiness doesn’t work though, so what I’ll tell you is that I simply got back to “it” last week. I got back to putting in the work and I celebrated the shiet out of my run with Huck on Saturday, telling him that I loved him no fewer than 100 times. Because, when all else fails…
… love is still a dog.
(Ref. 1) For those new around here, I experienced Stress Induced Iron Dysregulation during/after the pandemic. As someone with a genetic predisposition for hemochromatosis, the iron in my bloodstream is often a little too high (this makes me feel fatigued). Extreme stress blocks my body’s ability to store iron though. There are times where my too high iron levels are combined with nearly nonexistent ferritin level, leaving me anemic. The only way to increase my ferritin has been to flood my system with iron while increasing the potential for iron storage (I.e. increased/targeted vitamin c consumption and reduction of stress). When this came to head in 2021, I was deep in training for another 100-miler and ran myself into a fatigue hole (training “like I always did” but never really recovering). My performance was so horrible that I started to feel more anxiety about formal racing… which stressed me out more as I worried that the anxiety would put me back in the fatigue hole.
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