Short, Hard, and Dirty (but Hey, She's Pretty)!

The course was about .25 miles short of 13.1; the elevation
gain and loss made it very hard; and here is a great illustration
of both the dirty and the pretty scenery.

Fueled by Fine Wine is a half marathon that takes place in Dundee, Oregon, the heart of Oregon's wine country. Their slogan is something along the lines of, "you won't run your best time, but you'll have the best time." A more accurate appeal might be, "come try for your personal worst and then drink wine until you don't care about your finish time." I have to hand it to them though, it works. I have run it both years (it was started in 2010) and both years the course was changed at the last minute and turned out to be harder than advertised. This year was twice as hard as last year because it had at least twice the number of hills; it was, however, at least twice as beautiful to help ease the pain.

And boy was it painful. I haven't been this sore since I ran a marathon after six weeks of solid rest. I've been gimping around the house like my hips are made of peanut brittle. I'm sure this has a lot to do with my fetish for running down hills as fast as possible. In fact, I actually heard someone say, "she's coming in too fast, she'll never make the turn" as I came flying around the corner at the (downhill) finish line, as though I were coming in for a landing on an aircraft carrier. I'm going to hold on to that memory, as I doubt anyone will ever again worry that I'm running too fast (which I wasn't by the way; I made the turn just fine, thank you very much).

The other reason I, and everyone else I know who ran that race, took so long to recover is that we do not run enough trails. Although FBFW wasn't technically a trail race, there were swaths o the course that ran through the vineyards. Not nicely groomed trails, but lumpy, bumpy, grassy fields. All the little stabilizing muscles get called into service for this kind of running and it really make you sit up and take notice that those muscles rarely get a work out. Running trails is a great way to strengthen those axillary muscles, which can help prevent injury. They are also a heck of a lot of fun. I've gotten into kind of a complacent spot with my running lately and I'm glad this race came along to shake me out of my rut.