Since moving to California at the end of 2013, I’ve heard positive raves repeatedly about a few races: CIM in December, the Santa Cruz edition of she.is.beautiful 5k/10k, the Wharf to Wharf six-miler in Santa Cruz, and finally, Mountains to Beach marathon. I’ve run almost all of those races at least once by now, so I decided to dust off my spring marathon racing shoes and go for broke at MTB over Memorial Day weekend. 

Training for a late spring marathon in northern California isn’t as trying as it is in other places of the country (read: it’s just rain…), and logistically, training for a late spring marathon made a lot of sense since Janet was training for her first Boston that’d fall just about a month before MTB. Plus, she had run MTB last year (Erica, too, and I was there to see it!), so I could glean a lot from her and many of my other teammates about how to train well to race well on the course. I continued to work with Coach Lisa, picking up where we left off from CIM, and I was enthusiastic to see how everything would go down on this course that I had heard so much about. 

Tl; dr: Not a PR but a solid day (3:25) for my 34th marathon, despite stopping twice to poop and despite (because of?) a training cycle that necessitated my best Life Tetris-ing yet

Writing a marathon race recap months ex-post-facto isn’t the wisest when it comes to capturing the real-deal, raw, and vulnerable feelings, but I think the distance (appropriately) is actually pretty helpful when it comes to evaluating things with a deeper, wider lens. The long and short of it is that I drove five hours south sola — I tried to convince the family to come, but the kids weren’t interested — to run well, fast, strong, and ultimately (hopefully) to PR. My 2018 marathons (SF, CIM) left me convinced that my best marathon is still ahead of me, and dammit if I haven’t been determined to reach it. 

Aside from the beautiful drive south, the race’s relative accessibility from San Jose, the flurry of local friends I knew who’d be racing (including Erica and her Chicago gaggle!), the low entry fee for registering last fall, and the aforementioned I-had-a-training-partner-all-winter aspect, I was intrigued to run MTB because of the actual course. As its name suggests, runners start higher up, in super cute Ojai, and slowly work their way down the mountains via roads and paved trails before ending next to the ocean in Ventura. In other words, it’s supposed to be fast *and* pretty.

Like CIM, MTB is known for producing lots of BQs, PRs, and fast times, yet unlike CIM, MTB has far more net downhill than up (by my Garmin, something along the lines of a 1200’ loss and only a 475’ gain). Aside from CIM, I haven’t run a seriously downhill course in a long time, so I was intrigued by the challenge. I hadn’t trained for a spring marathon since Modesto ‘16, when I was about 7 months postpartum, so I was really looking forward to it. 

Going into MTB, I felt as strong as ever and was satisfied, if not proud, of how I managed my training alongside the 9783496 other balls I had up in the air all winter and spring. On race morning, it’s always so inspiring to me to look around at the sea of humanity and acknowledge that in order for all of us to get there, we had to make.shit.happen for weeks and months preceding The Big Day. Everyone has different or more/fewer numerous balls in the air, but rarely can any of us amateurs go all-in on our little marathon hobby at the expense of everything else. We do the best we can, and hopefully along the way, we learn how to become good Managers of Stuff because chances are high that on race day, we’ll be put in a situation — possibly situations, plural — that we didn’t see coming and whose reaction can make or break our race. 

Anyway, fortunately on race morning, I toed the line in Ojai without any niggles or injuries to speak of; the most significant bodily qualm that had plagued me for most of my training was (surprise, surprise) my stomach. Another change in GIs brought about a different plan of care and (surprise, surprise) a different diagnosis, so the best I could do was hope for the best and if things went south — read: if my bowels showed up to party, despite my pharmacological interventions to prevent that from happening — well, hope for a porta-potty or at the very least, tree cover.

Meredith (who was running the half) and her boyfriend graciously hosted me in their hotel when my own canceled my reservation when I was ten minutes away from arriving (!!), and those fine human beings also graciously got up with me at an ungodly 3am hour and dropped me off in downtown Ventura to catch a yellow school bus northeast. Nearly as soon as I arrived at the starting line, I met up with Erica and her many friends from all over the country (seriously, Erica is like the mayor of the midwest/east coast running community) to hang a bit before the show got on the road. Very soon after I returned to the starting line with Erica and company, I ran into my Wolfpack teammates Oscar and Mark who were out to have a good time (Oscar) and to run their first marathon (Mark). It was hard not to be in a good mood wearing lycra and spandex and galavanting around Ojai before 6 a.m.

The race? As promised, it was a lot of downhill — more uncomfortable than I would have anticipated, to be honest — making the occasional uphills particularly welcomed. I saw my teammates and friends within the first 5k, during a quick out-and-back, and I was heeding Lisa’s race plan as much as I could: stay in control, don’t demolish on the downhills, trust the training, it’s a good day to have a good day. 

I was absolutely that runner in a sea other sub/mid-3:20 racers who was thanking the volunteers, the cops, the EMTs, whomever because I was so dang calm and so in it that I had no mental real estate for doubt, or worry, or the inevitable race-day existential crises about why do I do these things again?

There was no where else I should have been on that morning except right there, on those roads, heading south to the beach, getting there literally by putting one foot in front of the other, hundreds of thousands of times.

I still get nervous before marathons — usually of the “excited nervous” variety — but for whatever reason, at MTB, I was as chill as I would be before a (very) long weekend LR. 

That’s not to say that it wasn’t hard because it most definitely was. Aerobically, I knew I was prepared to handle the distance, but just like in other recent races, bodily I felt strong, but I didn’t feel fast. Paces that I knew I hit routinely in hard training runs seemed to necessitate a farther reach than I thought prudent to give, and a GI psych around mile 8 gave me reason to hop into a porta-potty to make sure I wasn’t on the verge of shitting myself and wearing it for 18 miles (yikes). By mile 12 I knew that a PR was off the table — again, I felt strong, but the speed was nowhere to be seen — so the game changed from sub-3:20 like a boss to comfortably sub-3:30 and finish the race with unfinished business. My stomach showed up to party for real at mile 16 (fun fact: I only lost 100 seconds to two bathroom stops!), but honestly, aside from the GI nuisances and the relative lack of speed that I thought I was ready to post, I felt like I ran a strong race, and I’m proud of myself for staying in it and not mentally checking-out. I smiled widely and yelled obnoxiously when I saw friends mid-race or on the sidelines, and I legit let out an audible HOLY SHIT, THIS PLACE IS SO PRETTY at various times mid-race as we were all grinding along. 

Finishing a marathon with a smile on your face and proud of the effort you posted — regardless if it’s the PR/BQ/time you wanted to see — is an amazing feeling and makes the hours and hundreds/thousands of miles’ worth of training absolutely worth it. We can control our attitude and our effort; knowing this makes racing and running hard liberating. 

There is something incredible about covering 26.2 miles by your own volition and managing what oftentimes is a shitshow of feelings, if not also bodily challenges, for a few hours on some given weekend morning. In most of the 34 marathons I’ve run, at any given point throughout the 26.2 journey, I have retired from running, added to my list of “marathons to do in my lifetime,” wondered why I do this to myself, wondered why I didn’t start doing this to myself earlier, never felt more alive, envisioned fetal positioning on the road, and so on. 

This distance is revelatory in its ability to showcase us at both our best and our worst,  as well as our concomitant capacity to just feeeeeeeeel. It’s also good for pulling back the curtain on the potential that resides deep inside — not only for ourselves as runners but more importantly, for ourselves as human beings. What do we do when shit gets hard? How do we manage ourselves when we’re feeling like we’re spiraling? How do we serve others in their moment of need, regardless of how we feel at the time?    

This distance also has a great propensity to lend itself to over-analysis, waxing philosophic, and the crunchiest of crunchy hippie-dippie runner shit; I’m as guilty of it as anyone. It’s far easier to write about marathoning than it is to actually do the thing. 

In a way, it’s funny because I finished SF ‘18 in 3:26, feeling like I had been hit by a truck (and underperformed); then I posted 3:24 at CIM ‘18, feeling completely gutted by yet another disappointing underperformance; yet MTB’s 3:25 left me with a smile on my face and nothing but pride in myself and in my ability to just.handle.it when my race unfolded far more sideways than I anticipated. 

On the clock’s face, very little distinguishes these three marathons from each other, but in the greater picture of my lifetime marathon trajectory, these three races couldn’t be more different. Ultimately, I think it goes back to a lot of what Dr. and David Roche talked about in The Happy Runner: namely, at the end of the day, none of us are getting out of here alive. Zoom out, my friends, and choose your stressors and suffering wisely. Don’t squander the opportunity or the gift. 

Post-race, Meredith, her boyfriend, and I hung for a while at the finish line and cheered in more runners before meeting-up with Erica and her gaggle at her friend’s beautiful home. We shared war stories from the morning, commiserated at the debacle that is having to poop mid-race, and began scheming for the 2020 iteration. (I already registered). 🙂 Before long, I was on the road again and made it home for bedtime (after making a side trip to Cayucos for cookies for the family, of course). 

The MTB marathon is an excellent option for runners who are looking to notch a fast time or who are interested in simply running through some pretty, albeit rural-ish, locales. Late May in the central coast can be iffy in terms of weather (we actually got rained on a little, whereas in previous years, including in ‘18, it got pretty warm), but then again, the weather is iffy for any race, anywhere, at any time. Race logistics like porta-potties, shuttles, and the like seemed to go over swimmingly (though they’d probably stand to benefit from more potties at the start line), but if you’re looking for a big, busy marathon, this one is probably too low-key for you. Crowds are sparse but enthusiastic, particularly once you get into Ventura over the last ~10k of the race, and at least if you’re local to the Bay Area, you’ll probably be able to easily find training partners during the winter (ahem, Wolfpack!) because it seems like just about every local runner trains for MTB’s full or half at least once. This race does a bang-up job, and I’m already looking forward to running those roads again on both strong and fast legs in May ‘20.