Boycott Black Friday Day 1

Wow, this race was too much for this tired person!  Today is the first of the three day series of Boycott Black Friday races.  They are 12 hour races from 8am to 8pm.  But you can come and go when you want and run as far or as long as you want.  It's a 2.6 mile lap and you count laps for your total distance.  I had hoped to make at least a marathon distance, but that hope was quickly dashed.

What a tough course!  It's along snow covered deeply rutted ATV trails through the Palmer Moose Range.  It's been so warm so that even though it's all snow covered, it is very slushy and the deep tire ruts are full of standing water. The second half of the course is very hilly trail.  That part is very narrow foot packed deep snow, about the width of my two feet.  The entire course is so uneven that my poor legs and ankles felt like limp spaghetti as I stumbled along.  I managed to do 10 laps for about 21 miles.  But that took me 9 hours, which is absurdly slow even for me.  The sun doesn't come up until 9:45am and goes down at 3:45pm, so much of the.race is in the dark. I kept hoping and calculating, figuring I'd have just enough time for the 10 laps for a full marathon. But by the middle of the 8th lap, in the dark, I felt it was questionable whether I'd even make it back to the start point.  The uneven terrain was causing me to have severe low back pain, which was quickly becoming intolerable.  At the end of lap 8, I gave up and called it a day.  I only know of one person who actually ran the full 12 hours, and many didn't run as many laps as I did.  But I knew I'd had enough.  It was great fun, but I was so ready to call it a day!