AC - DNF

Well - it was inevitable. I woefully underestimated (forgot) the amount of physical and mental preparation necessary for Angeles Crest. Normally, I start hurting when driving past Rancho Cucamonga on the way to Wrightwood in anticipation of running the race or just simply going over Baden Powell and Mt. Williamson (and back). While I was walking from Eagles Roost to Cloudburst where I quit, I started making an inventory of the ways in which I should have been able to tell that I wasn't prepared to run AC. To make something positive of this, I've decided that in the future, I'll base my decision to race on objective criteria, specifically certain workout statistics over the last few months, as follows:

• How many 100 mile weeks? 110 mile? etc
  
• How many 10,000 ft (elevation gain) weeks
  
• How many weekday 3000 ft (elevation gain) workouts? How many 4000 ft workouts?
  
• How many 16 miles in 2 hour workouts
  
• How many miles at a given pace (7:00/7:30/8:00/8:30 per mile)
  
• How many Baldyx2 workouts? How about double double Baldy? (Mt Baldy is a 10,064 ft peak in So Cal. The typical run up is 4,000 ft gain in 8 miles.)
  
• Is my weight at 145? 143?
  
• Can I do 50 Pushups?
  
• How many black or missing toenails do I have?
  
• How many over and back over Baden Powell+
  
• How many mountain 50 milers (Bishop, Leona Divide) in this year.
  

To follow up on a previous post, the USA men captured third place in the 100 km World Cup thanks to another solid top 10 performance from Howard Nippert and PR's from Greg Crowther and Chad Ricklefs. The USA women missed Anne Lundblad and Nikki Kimball but still finished 4th in the team standings. Devon Crosby-Helms seems to have had somewhat of a breakout performance, finishing as 2nd USA woman behind Kami Semick with a fine 8:06.

I would have liked to see the finish. 1 second separated the 2nd man (Japan) and the 3rd man (Russia). I was impressed by the splits of 13th place Takehiro Matsushita. In a race where most slow in the second half, Matsushita San ran mostly descending splits of 43:09 42:55 42:33 42:20 42:04 41:38 40:56 41:05 40:31 41:48. In fact the rate at which he accelerated was very consistent, racking up improvements of 14, 22, 13, 16, 26, 42, -9, 34, and -1:17. My guess is that he "shut it down" the last lap after he knew that he'd break 7:00 and wasn't going to score for his team.