Nanny Goat Ultra: 50 miles in 9:36

This Saturday was the Nanny Goat race – it’s a local ultra in Southern California, and competitors can run 12 hours, 24 hours, or 100 miles. I registered for the 12 hour race with no real goal in mind, and ran 50 miles in 9:36 – a great pace for me – before calling it a day.

The event was my kind of race, catering to the fringy, fun-loving, and a slightly unhinged ultrarunner demographic. This made for a great atmosphere, so different than what you find at aggressive road races. Characteristic of veteran ultrarunners, everyone at this event was extremely friendly and excited to chat. There were also runners who dressed up in costumes – @runjesterrun was there in full jester regalia, which was really fun to see! Other runners wore pink tutus or grass skirts.

In true strange-ultrarunner fashion, we started the race in a goat pen. To kick it off, they opened the gate and we all stampeded out and on to the course.

The course itself was a 1-mile loop.

We ran through a horse stable & barn area, and some runners in the 24-hour event set up their mini-camps in the stables.

We got to see ponies at every mile, and ran through a tunnel of orange trees.

We also met the cone of death every mile at the turn-around. Because this turnaround was so tight – myself included – took to pivoting the other direction around the turn – we’d do a little spin to stretch out the muscles on the other side of our bodies. This worked really well at the beginning of the race, and progressively less well as our muscles got more and more tired.

[By now, you’ve seen basically the entire course, although somewhat in reverse order.]

I was crashing pretty hard around mile 31 – pretty tired, a little dizzy, and bad body-temperature control. I pinged Will, who explained that I was probably tired because I had just run 31 miles. This made sense, and I turned on some pump up music to power through.

To participate in the costumery, I found a cat-ear headband to wear, which made me easily identifiable and also made me some friends. This included one pacer who, after he made dog-barking noises, I coerced into running my last three laps with me.

The best part was seeing one of my Antarctica shipmates at the finish – Rose, who lives nearby, came to cheer me on for the last lap and a half, and we went to get ice cream right afterwards. Great end to a very fun race.

I was definitely not trained to run a 100-miler this weekend, and that was never part of the plan, but now that I know how fun this race is, I’m thinking about it for next year …