The days leading up to my first ultra!

(Race report will be the next blog post)

Read this section if you need to be caught up to speed:
I signed up for Old Goats 50 mile race 1 month before race day, in a slightly mad craze to give my remaining 3 and a half weeks of time to train in Ashland purpose. I was scheduled to depart the country for 2 months, a couple days after the race. So I signed up for the race, got in from the waitlist and had begun some more specific training for it. I quickly got a cold and that put a damper on training for over a week... this brings us up to date read on for the report...

I took my last final for school and hopped on my motorcycle to start my ride home from Ashland,OR to Trabuco Canyon, CA. I did this over 2 days so I only had to get to Davis, CA for night 1 on wednesday before the saturday scheduled ultra. This portion of the ride home took 4+hours just as expected. I had my two saddlebags filled with clothing and I wore my backpacking pack on my back that was chaulk full of gear for my (now less than a week away) upcoming backpacking trip in south/central america.
I made it to Davis with no problems and had pizza and beer with my (sometimes running) friend Spencer, whom along with his girlfriend Julie was gracious enough to let me stay at their place for the night to help break up my ride home. Julie kindly made me breakfast in the morning and I was off by 8am to start the 7+ hour ride home. I cruised at 75/80mph on I5 eager to get home and start my recovery and maybe get a short run in before the race. I made it a goal to get 100 miles between every stop. As I got through the first and second stop, I was increasingly uncomfortable physically and a bit nauseus. This began to make for a miserable ride. I just persisted and knew I had no other option but to get home today and despite the soreness coming on, I needed to start recovering for the race.

After many hours of what I can`t call anything other than agony, I got to L.A. and made my last gas stop. I was at the peak of my stomach sickness and laid down next to my motorcycle to rest. I got up for wáter, and threw up all over the ground next to the gas pump. I didn´t even have the energy to go inside and tell the worker what I had done to his gas station. I heaved myself onto my hog knowing the next time I got off I could rest indefinitely. It took about an hour and a half to cover the next 40 miles, but I made it home by some miracle of will power, and the need for the finish line.
It was thursday and I got home at 5pm after 9 of the longest hours of my life. On the upside, I have now experienced ill-prepared long distance motorcycle traveling. May I suggest getting a windshield before riding anywhere near this distance, and a backrest!

As I laid down for the next 18 hours, I worried about how I would run this 50 mile race in a day. To my surprise, I was not really sore on friday. I walked around a bit and ate and drank wáter fine. This all made me very happy considering how things were going for me lately. I was coming to terms with everything just fine and then I checked my email in the early afternoon. The news from the race director, the old goat himself Steve Harvey was the best news I had heard all week.

.....Stay tuned for my next blog post which will be the actual race report!

PS.. I am typing all this in Valparaíso, Chile on a hostel computer. This means the computer and keyboard and online settings are in a limbo between spanish, english, and whatever languages travelers set them to. So please excuse misspelled words and weird punctuation, if any at all.