Lord Hill 50k in the bag

When I first moved to WA my second ever 50k run was Lord Hill in Snohomish. I did it the year after again, amazed by the park's beauty, and the fact that there are so many familiar faces out there. When we moved back I heard from Tim that the run was cancelled in 09 and 10 as well since he was very busy with work and family, so I took over as RD, using most of his general course design, shortening it a bit to 10 Miles exact per loop. Permit processes always take much longer the first year around but it got done finally and we were all set for the first 4thDimensionRacing trail run since the three Ron Herzog 50k's we put on a couple of years ago.
After running on saturday all around the city on pavement for about 10 miles and having a bit too many beers i was not particularly looking forward to markin the course at 2AM, but after packing and finally leaving thats where it came out to be. However the run was great, it was nice being out there at night, sometimes a bit spooky with the deer showing up from nowhere, but I got used to that.
The day turned out to be great, the race was sold out, people enjoyed the course (sorry for those that had some troubles with the course markings, my promise for any races forward is that we will have trail arrows, probably better and easier for everyone) and the aid stations, and everyone enjoyed the 10 extra large pizzas Alfy's pizzeria sponsored, and the all organic fruit and the vegetable soup sponsored by Nature's Last Stand. Plus a volunteer made lots of brownies and we had Toblerone Chocolates out there, so people did not get hungry.
We had a ton of fun putting this on and learned a few things in the process we will have to change for next year, but overall this was a great day.

Photos can be found at: www.4thDimensionRacing.com/forum
And results are posted at: www.4thDimensionRacing.com/results









Keith Wood, 81 Years old, ran 20Miles, what a stud!

Colinoba 2010, or when pirates roamed the city

The reason this year's Lord Hill 50k was on Sunday and not Saturday was mainly due to the fact that my Saturday had been reserved for a while now. My friend Colin has been putting on a birthday bash/pub crawl/adventure race/scavenger hunt for his birthday for 6 years now, and it gets better every year. All dressed up (mimes, cowboys, thing1/2, pirates, superman, and so forth) teams of 2-5 run/navigate across the city and have to solve puzzles, find sights, take lots of pictures, drink lots of beer (not mandatory obviously, the RD would not condone such a terrible thing:) and generally do lots of things you only get to do when you are a kid or at mardi-gras.. and boy it's been fun! Over the last few years we had to ride rollercoasters, wear utility kilts, sell dried apples at the market, and so forth, its been a blast.

This year since Yumay sprained her knee and was out for the race i teamed up with Frenchy, Amanda and Susan to form Team Arrrrrr, Susan had all the pirate props, and we ran about 8-10 miles through the city, had an occasional beer or irish car bomb (yummy), and did lots of special tasks.

Thanks Colin and Connie for yet another fun race!

Lord Hill Sanity Check #2

I just had to run it one more time, one more time with three independent GPS's to make sure the course is accurate, and fortuntely it is...

Yesterday I went out to Lord Hill Regional Park again to make sure racers will have accurate 10Mile, 20Mile and 50km courses, and French came out to run it with me, which is always more fun than running it alone. Out there we met a 81!! year old guy who is planning on doing the 50km race as well, that is plain crazy! Tough guy, he told us he did several 50ks last year, and knew all about the wall of death (its an about 300 feet long hill with 150 foot climb, now thats a killer doing it once, but three times in the 50k is tough, and if i can do that when i am 81 years old i am going to be pretty darn happy!

Race #1 of the season in the books

This first race ended up being a bit more work than anticipated, but since they all are maybe i just need to adjust my expectations a bit... not that different from a 100 mile run or 24h adventure race, you tend to expect it to be easier, then after the race tend to forget how hard it was. So note to self, probably forgotten in a couple of days.

I went out there very early saturday, set the major part of the course, took an italian shower (sorry, a term i grew up with in Switzerland, basically drying yourself off with a towel after sweating profusely and applying copious amounts of perfume and deodorant, all set!), then looked over the maps with a headlamp haning out in the car all evening, and sleeping in the back of the car before getting up at 4.30AM to get HQ set up.

Sure enough then there was also taking down CPs after the race, though that was a great team effort from many of our volunteers as well!

The race went well, teams had a lot of fun, all CPs were set accurately and the weather was phantastic. One down, many, many more to go!

Oh by golly scouting can be a lot of fun

So going scouting for new race courses can be either a ton of fun or hell on wheels... sometimes you are out there for 24h straight, running or biking endless miles on fireroads, bushwhacking senselessly up a ridge, only to find out that it is all in vain because the course is dull, dangerous or whatever else monkey wrench to choose from......

And sometimes you get what we got today: Nice weather, a perfect course, and the green light from the rangers to go ahead. Yeehaaw!

Race location will be Salmon La Sac, racecourse is interesting to say the least, the snow is perfect right now, and the area is just gorgeous. No more words, just pictures.