Event: Shannon Trail Race 2
Distance: 12K
Date: 2025-02-01, Sat, 8:00a
Location: San Angelo, TX; San Angelo SP
Event Host: San Angelo Road Lizards (SARL)
Note: I love the way Google Maps (Garmin Connect) shows the OC Fisher Lake full of water. You can sort of see the lake bed in the official course map above it.
The water has been gone so long, San Angelo SP has lots and lots of abandoned “lake front” facilities and infrastructure overgrown with cacti. Not to mention the trails established over the dry lake bed.
San Angelo Road Lizards race 2 done!
While I love the San Angelo State Park, I had a hard time getting myself out there this time.
I spent the week leading up to it shifting travel days to delay and shorten my time camping. I’m still tremendously enjoying the events, but I’m very tired of the travel and camping. 😕 I just have to keep upping my camping game to be more comfortable while doing it.
Changing my reservation to different and fewer days, meant changing camp sites. I was still able to get an RV site with electricity and water and stay within a .5 mile walk of the race hub. With the electricity, I was able to make careful, judicious use of a small electric heater inside the tent.
What a difference that made. And by keeping it at the lowest possible setting, I was able to position it far enough away from everything to avoid overheating any surface inside the tent. (I kept touching those surfaces with my bare hand to make doubly sure.)
Photo: Middle pics in the collage, tent is up. The rest shows the loaner truck packed up and ready to roll next day.
Another game changer: I remembered the insulating pad for my XL cot. (It’s that orangey-brown thing you see through the tent opening and rolled up in the back cab.) No more cold backside while sleeping. Bonus! It’s not inflatable so no chance of it flattening out overnight, as happened that first night in Tyler.
Saturday morning was clear and beautiful—and cold. Wunderground weather history shows it was 29°F just before the race start at 8:00am. I don’t know if it was that cold out at the park, though. My Android weather app was showing low 30s while I was trying to decide if I should layer. Like the previous race, I knew the temperature was going to rise quickly with the sun, predicted to be in the upper 70s that day. Bundle up and sweat later, or dress for a warm body once the race began?
I wimped out, unwilling to hang around the race hub shivering for 30 to 40 minutes waiting for the start. I ended up wearing my thermal underwear under a lighter pair of leggings, long sleeve tech shirt, gloves, and a knit cap. The only layering I did on my upper body was a hoodie, which I left on a bench in the pavilion. (It was still there when I returned. I’d half expected it to go into lost and found.)
I failed again as my own crew. I forgot to bring my hydration pack! Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad a fail as forgetting to fill my water bladder at Tyler. I keep a hydration belt in the “running box” in my truck. I did remember to fill those before I left camp that morning. 😜
Kind of a pain without the pack itself, though. I had to stuff my gloves into the little pouch on the belt, which made getting a face tissue out to blow my nose every 30 min a challenge. After gloves, it was the knit cap. That wouldn’t fit in the pouch. Since I was using my trekking poles I couldn’t carry it in my hand. So I stuffed it down my pants over my left hip. Other than having the weird bulge there, it worked well. It stayed in place even when I was running.
And I did run. I started the race knowing I was going to push myself in this one. The 12K (7.46M) distance wasn’t long enough to be a problem for me, particularly with the mostly flat terrain. Ummm…Flat, but very technical.
The course was littered with “ankle rollers,” plus deep, long sections of trail erosion (water channeling), abrupt rocky “steps” leading up and down the few rises on the course, and, of course, the cacti and other vegetation that pokes and scratches—fortunately, it doesn’t bite.
I averaged what was an excellent trail pace for me, an 18:23 min mile. Best part, I was still being a bit conservative and finished with only minor hip pain. I could have gone faster or farther. (Even more so if I hadn’t been stopping to snap pictures. 😁) Good news from a training perspective.
For most of the 12K course, I held the last place position. Initially, there were two younger guys behind me who, based on their conversation, planned to hike the whole thing. They were each over 6′ tall. Just their longer strides meant they were going to outpace me. They quickly got close enough that I stopped to let them pass me. I was able to keep them in sight for quite a while, but eventually it was just me out there by myself.
Until a woman came blasting up on my back trail out of the blue!
She was so quiet and I wasn’t expecting a runner behind me at that point. When I realized something was moving on the trail behind me, I instantly thought it was some of the wildlife coming up on me. I’d seen a javelina, aka collared peccary, (the first one I’d seen in the wild), on my morning walk to the race hub.
Not a javelina. A human female and she was fast. I assumed she’d gotten a very late start and was making up time.
I was delighted to see the finish line arch still up when I got to the end of the course. The announcer was still there, the volunteer handing out medals, the camera, a few runners and additional volunteers, as well. When I announced I was probably the last runner, the woman volunteer handing me the medal said, “No. We’ve got one more still out there.” I didn’t think that was true, but I didn’t argue.
She was kind enough to take the finish line photo I included up above. Whoop-whoop! I don’t normally try to get a finish line photo. However, given my experience with finishing Race 1, I felt I had to get one of me under the still-standing-arch for this one.
I decided to hang around so I could see and cheer on that last runner. And to see if the arch stayed up for them or not. 😉
I hung out over at the pavilion, sitting backwards at a picnic table where I could watch the course leading up to the finish line. Ended up meeting a “witch doctor” while waiting. Let me explain.
He approached me at my “lookout” position and asked how I’d done and, “How did your knees hold up?”
I think he had me confused with someone else he’d spoken with at the start of the race, but it was almost on target so I didn’t correct it and simply responded that they’d done fine.
He was looking my knees over and said, “You’ve got some swelling, don’t you.” He then reached over and squeezed one knee, then the other.
😐 …
“Oh, sorry. I’m a doctor! I should have said that. I’m a doctor so I touch people.”
I never got his name, but learned in addition to being a doctor, he was a life long runner (age 77) and endurance athlete. I thought, Great a doctor and a senior runner! Let me pick his brain. I asked about what other training he did.
He smiled. “Triathlons. I’ve completed 84 triathlons. I swim. I bike. I run. That’s it.”
Alrighty then. That line of inquiry wasn’t getting me anything.
I don’t recall how the conversation took a turn into longevity. At some point he raised the issue and made of point of letting me know the high number of centenarians reported in particular areas of the world weren’t true. “Someone looked into it and one of the people listed had been dead for years. It’s all about tourism.” Then the conversation took another turn. “You know, the old witch doctor’s could predict when someone was going to die. They used the age of their parents.”
He went on to explain it really has to be more detailed than that. “If I have the data from all your close relatives, parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles…” He paused as if for dramatic effect. “I can predict your death down to the year. To the month. To the day. To the hour you will die.”
“That’s kind of creepy,” I said. “I don’t think I want to know.”
“Oh, the rich people do. They want to know how much time they have left.” I gathered that was where he got some supplemental income.
Hence, by his own words, I came to the conclusion he was, himself, a witch doctor. Interesting and entertaining fellow, for sure. 😂
By the way, no one came across the finish line after me. I watched them take down the arch, at that time thinking some one was still on the course. I continued to wait, however, when they began packing up tables and chairs too, I decided to head out on the half mile walk back to camp.
When I looked into the results later, I found I was DFL again and had, again, captured the first place position in my age group. If I finish the Race 3 15K (9.32M) in another week, I expect to get the race series award for my age group!
Oh. A note on my training nutrition: Post race pancakes might be becoming a problem.
