50k Run in the hills to experiment with food

This weeks long run was a 50k plus a little extra.

I needed to figure out where I was going wrong with crapping out after 25 miles and doing the walk, shuffle, and slow run dance to finish the route.  I knew it had to be fuel related because after the run I felt fine, no muscle aches or other issues.  It had to be fuel related and not simply lack of strength or endurance capacity.

So today I got a bunch of different food items together and loaded up a new running pack I was testing out with water food and lots of other essentials for a long day in the hills.  The new pack seemed empty in comparison to the usual Ultimate Direction FKT vest.  I'll do a separate blog entry for my gear some time in the future.

Enough water for a self supported six hour day is pretty heavy, but the new pack felt great.

The food I packed is listed below.

2x Cliff Bars - Coconut Choc Chip
 - https://www.clifbar.com/products/clif/clif-bar/coconut-chocolate-chip
Not labeled as wheat free but close enough.

3x Date and Coconut chunks from a local Organic grocers.  About 100 calories each.
1x Homemade Oat Bar, peanut butter and, honey and cocoa. About 100-150 calories.
2x medium sized boiled potatoes with a generous sprinkling of Himalayan Pink salt.
1x Banana.
2.5 Liters of filtered water.

Nothing contained wheat or sugar or processed ingredients.  All pretty much real whole foods.
The Cliff bars are not perfect in that respect, but really convenient and taste great.

My idea was to have  something every 45 minutes and wash it down with water.

I had one of the potatoes at about mile 13, then the other at about mile 20.  The rest of the food I had spaced in between the salty potato.

The end result was I felt great and even about half an hour before the end I had the idea of refilling the water bottles and doing another 20 mile out and back over a hill in the other direction to do a 50 mile run.  I would have done that, but I have a race next weekend and after this weeks high amount of miles that was a really dumb idea, so I bailed on that one.  Plenty more opportunity to do that coming up.

Here are some pictures of the route today.  I added some new paths and forest roads to a run I do from time to time to add the miles on to make it a 50k ish one.


A few random pictures of the route below.

Looking back towards the Ocean.  Where I started from is just to the left of my head down a sea level.

The picture above is from when I reached a dead end on a trail/road but I could see another set of roads below that I knew intersected a road I just passed, so I wanted to get down there to do a loop.  I noticed a fairly well used Elk trail ahead and going that direction so decided to go that way.
Elk have long legs thick skin four wheel drive and as I found tend to jump of 10-15 foot high ledges like they are level.  Not so easy for us two legged human things!

Got there though, and that's where I scrambled very carefully down.  its actually a lot further and steeper than the picture indicates.

Today was a nice temperature and overcast so there were some really nice views of the hills.

 This shows the road behind me that went to the dead end, the road in the left of the picture is where I came up from my Elk impression scramble to get to the roads.

Next time I'm going to run over all of these roads.  Where I got down to. 

Overall a great day out and I figured out how to fuel for a long race/adventure run.  It might look a bit sketchy in places but its actually pretty safe going.  Wild animals don't like human interaction and keep out of your way, its other humans (which you don't see many of this far out) that are the dangerous ones!

The stuff below is the route stats etc.

32.79 Miles
6,143 feet total climbing and loss.
Time:
  Total time: 6 hrs 12 mins
  50k Time: 5hrs 56 mins
My goal has been for a sub six hour 50k, I failed that the last two times.  Done it this time!  Happy!!

Run to Ridge Spur with a view this time

Another run up to Ridge Spur, and since it was a clearer day and the cloudbase was high I was hoping to finally get a view from the top.
The last four attempts at this route failed to produce a view from the top due to the cloudbase dropping while I was going up.

The run started as usual from home and I made my way up through the Ecola Reserve park area and up into the wild bit of the hills.

Although the run to Ridge Spur isn't all that far at about 8.5 miles its a really hard one because of the elevation gain and a lot of it in a short distance.

Behind me is to the North with a view over the hill to Seaside.

Another view to the North.  This is only about 850 feet ASL at this point.  A long way to go yet.... and not many miles to do it in.

Finally a view from the top of Ridge Spur.  The top of Ridge Spur runs almost Northwest to Southeast, so the view isn't all that good to the North from up here.

Looking East-ish

West-ish to the small town of Archcape.

I took a video from the top, youtube has removed a lot of the quality after it uploaded, but here it is.

Normally when I run up here because its such a brutal route I just head for home, but I wanted to have a longer run time wise today so I explored a new road up in this area.

After running down a side spur road I came to this opening.  I could see a number of new roads waiting to be explored!

This is the road I ran down, there's a dead end just past where I'm standing.  It used to be a road but a landslide a really long time ago has closed it and there's new trees growing over it.

Strange rock formations exposed.

Along another side road off of where the pictures above were taken I ran down an interesting little set of hairpin bends than up onto a little hilltop.   The picture below is from the top of that little hill.  Looking Southwest.

The hairpins I ran down.

Looking Northwest towards Haystack Rock.

The run took me 3 hours 50 minutes including all the stops to enjoy the views.  It came to 21 mies with 4500 feet of elevation gain and loss.  My aim for this was to be moving for longer than usual on a harder route and I didnt care about pace or mileage.  A race I'm signed up for in October will probably take me about 6 hours to complete, so I need to do more days like this and even longer ones.

Elevation and mileage profile.

cameron francey, mountain running, oregon cannon beach, runningwithcameron, Trail Running