I recently sat down to read the April 2013 edition of Trail Runner magazine and came across an article called "The Heart of the Matter." It was about Amy Sproston, Meghan Arbogast and Pam Smith. They all live in Oregon and are have helped lead the US Women's 100k team to silver and gold in the 2011 and 2012 World Championships. It was a great article discussing how they are all extremely busy and have a lot going on in their personal lives but they still manage to fit in running and be great at it. I had heard of Meghan before because she was the winner of the 2013 Way Too Cool 50k that I just ran in March. I just looked her up on Ultrasignup.com and she finished this years race in 4:06:45 and is 51 years old. That's about 25 minutes faster than her first WTC finish of 4:31 in 2006. Sever years older and she keeps getting faster. Ultrarunners blow me away time and time again.
I hadn't heard of Pam Smith prior to reading the article but I just ran the American River 50M on Saturday and low and behold, Pam Smith was the female winner finishing in a time of 6:54. (That's almost 4 hours faster than my finish and only 44 minutes longer than it took me to run WTC this year.) I decided to look her up on Ultrasignup and see how she usually performs in her races. I noticed that while she is usually a strong runner, it took her 28 hours to finish Western States last year. For any average human this would be a tremendous feat but for an elite ultrarunner this is SLOW. So I googled "Pam Smith 2012 Western States" to see if I could find out what happened to her to cause such a slow finishing time. I came across her blog and found her race report titled "my Crazy-Ass Western States" and she fully explained her time. She has been blogging about her races since 2008 and I've barely scratched the surface of what she has in there. I really look forward to reading more of her race reports.
But I wanted to share one of her reports that I found really inspiring. She did a 24 hour race last month with her 8 year old daughter. It was an interesting story for me because I have never seen the attraction of completing 6, 12, or 24 hour races. I like having a set distance and trying to get myself there in one piece as quickly as I can. But these timed races are typically run on a small course. Runners complete lap after lap after lap and see how many they can complete in the 24 hours. Anyway, the blog featured Pam's race review as well as her daughters. It was pretty awesome and inspiring to read about an 8 year old girl pushing herself to complete 27 miles in one day. This made me think of a few of my friends/family members in particular who think its crazy to go run 50 miles. Maybe I can't convince them to run 50 miles, but maybe I can get them to push themselves for 12 hours to see how far they can get. I liked the idea of having a car to go rest in when you need it, and even a mattress, and then getting back up and back on the course when you feel ready. Hmmm... could be a fun girl's weekend sometime???? Anyone interested?
Here is the link to Pam Smith's blog if you'd like to read it yourself - http://www.theturtlepath.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2014-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=11
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