Yesterday I ran the Chuckanut Mountain 50km Trail Run. Our race started even before we got to the start line. Packman, T and I left Mrs. Packman’s parents place in North Vancouver at 5:30am with the intent of making it to the start line about a hour before the race. We made good time getting out of Vancouver but once we hit the Border Crossing things came to a grinding halt. We had no idea it would be so busy at 6:00am in the morning. We didn’t get through until just after 7 and then drove as fast as we could to Bellingham. We made a very quick stop at a local store to grab a coffee and use their washrooms to change and then ran to the park to get our bibs and timing chips. There were still a bunch of people in the check-in line, thankfully we weren’t the only ones running late, so they pushed back the start time by a few minutes which gave us all just enough time to get our stuff in order.

This was my first time running Chuckanut and I went into it with a time goal of 5:15 – 5:20. I made it to Aid Station 1 in just over 50′ and thought then that if I can get out of the mountain stages by noon I’d have over a hour to cover the last 10km and still make it in under my goal time. Well… as you can see by my finishing time things didn’t work out like that. I’m not bummed and have no complaints about my time, it felt great to cross the finish line in under 6 hours – the mountainous part of the course was a tough challenge for me!

Even with the challenges I had a great time, the tough sections of the course were decorated with little inspirational signs saying things like; “Mud is wonderful”, “Slippery like slug slime”, “At least it’s not the big Chinscraper” and some signs had route markings with very descriptive course directions such as; “Steep drop ahead”, “Turn left or else”, “No base jumping allowed!”… I’d definitely like to run this one again!

The was a large contingent of Canadian runners, 72 in total. Gary Robbins, Todd Nowack, Rob “Packman” Mackay and the few other names I recognized all did very well.

Here you can find the Overall Results.

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Posted in Journal by Jarhead 1 Comment