December 9th, 2006
by Tim King
Here's a little report on the Sunmart race last weekend...was a lot
of fun and all the Taturs did great..was fun being able to have
fellow Tulsan's out there to run with..
My wife Julie Thomas and I completed our first 50 mile run at the
Sunmart Trail run in Huntsville, TX which is north of Houston. We had
a great time and are both still walking pretty well. The run is in
Huntsville State Park which was very pretty. We did 4 12.5 mile
loops. At first that sounded kind of crappy but the loops ended up
not being too bad. After the second loop you pretty much knew where
you were and how far to next rest stop etc. The overall support for
the race was great, had a big breakfast tent set up before the race
and had lots of food afterwards. We got a lot of 'goodies' before the
race, big duffle bag two hats, polo shirt..pretty cool. We got a
tyvek finishers jacket (which I will wear with pride) and the
requisite finishers medal at the end. The rest stops on the course
were every 2-3 miles and had all kinds of food and stuff to
drink..best were the boiled potatos. I had pretty good luck eating
taters and bananas and drinking whatever they had..gatorade, mt. dew,
dr. pepper all worked pretty good. I started taking ibuprofen and
tums after second lap and that seemed to work out pretty good for me.
The trails were nice, quite a few tree roots but not too bad, was
nice and rolling not pancake flat but no huge climbs..lot' s of big
pine trees and even had palm trees in the woods which don't see much
of in Oklahoma. Had a whole bunch of wooden bridges over the swampy
sections..some over 50 yards long seemed like.very good place to do
first 50 miler. There were about 200 in the 50 miler and 800 in 50k.
The 50k and 50 mile shared the same trail for part of the course but
on most of it was just 50 milers and was pretty spread out...some
crazy old guy who I ran with for a while said this was his 30th race
of 26 miles or more this year he had been to China and raced on the
Great Wall and was planning on going to Himalayas for run next
year...hmmm maybe know what will do in retirement now....Julie and I
both felt pretty good when we finished, tired but not too beat up.
Julie ended up finishing in 8:46 (4th in age group and 10th
female...not bad for first 50 miler and considering there were people
from all over the country) and I finished in 9:12 which I was happy
with..
Tim King