Golden Hills Marathon / Firetrails – 2nd place

I ran a trail marathon a few weeks ago and I came in 2nd!

The race – Golden Hills Marathon – was at Lake Chabot, which is an area I’ve run in a number of times
This was a training run – I was getting frustrated with my normal running routes so wanted something different (and supported / with aid stations because that’s logistically easier)
This was on the same day as the Firetrails 50-miler, which I have run before and is fun. The first Firetrails 50 athletes finished right after I did and only started 2 hours ahead of us.
About ten of us (in a field of 30) got lost on the marathon course (took the wrong outbound); I made it up on the way back, which the race director was fine with. (It also didn’t change the answer as I was substantially behind the 1st place person and still 10-15min ahead of the 3rd place person). We figured it out when some really fast runners started passing us – they should have been substantialy ahead of us. It was easy to make up on the way back but I may have been the one who missed the turn who did that
My new friend Tracy was at one of the aid stations – my biggest regret is not taking a photo with him
Wine is for winners!

Map:

The magenta and blue arrows are my annotations
The blue arrows are the outbound route, and the pink arrow is what you are supposed to take coming back
A bunch of us took the pink out instead of the blue
I took the blue back to make sure I had the right mileage. I think it ended up being less than a mile of extra distance