Race Debrief 26-02: Highlander Heavy Half
A half marathon took me four hours and eighteen minutes on Sunday, and I'm genuinely proud of it. That sentence is the whole lesson of trail running, so let's break it down.
By the numbers
Official time 4:18:52, good for 34th of 49 finishers and 8th woman. 13.96 miles by the watch, 4,203 feet of climbing, which is 300 feet of gain per mile. For scale, Wild Goose two weeks ago was 114 per mile. The winners ran 2:41. The first woman ran 3:17. This is a race where the mountain sets the terms and everyone negotiates.
What happened
A yellowjacket stung me at mile two. Good time to find out I'm not allergic. After that, the course got down to business: the Hudson Highlands stack climbs the way other races stack aid stations, and the middle of this one lives between 1,100 and 1,250 feet, up, down, and up again, on rock that demands your full attention.
I raced it on a week of almost total rest. Quarter-close week at work plus feeling run down meant the smart move was not training, and the old me would have panicked about that. Instead: my best UltraSignup performance ever, a 76.39 for the race, which pulled my overall ranking up two points. A week of rest before a hard effort isn't lost fitness. It's often the missing ingredient.
The nerdy part, because this is where the race was actually run
I paced by heart rate, not by pace, because pace is meaningless at 300 feet per mile. Climbs at 172 to 173 beats per minute, hard but repeatable. Descents recovering to the high 140s. Average 161 for four-plus hours.
And the finish: a three-minute sprint at 192 steps per minute that touched 191 bpm, a number I'd never seen on a run before. Four thousand feet into the day, the legs still had a gear. That's the data point I'm taking to December.
What I learned
Pick the effort, not the pace, and the course stops being scary. Eat before the climbs, not on them. And a stacked October works: this was race two of a four-weekend block, run hard but not emptied, with a 10K in two weeks and a group hike on its course this Saturday.
Also: first UTMB Index race, first Index score. A small door opened quietly.
Next
Big Bear 10K, October 18, Harriman. Shorter, faster, and after Sunday, 185 feet per mile is going to feel like a track. Debrief 26-03 will be the quick one.