Running around in some arid red mountains
Silver State 50k Race Report
Yesterday I ran the Silver State 50k in Reno, Nevada and placed second with a time of 4:24:36. I’m currently in a 12-week training block for my first 100k—Siskiyou Outback in the mountains above Ashland, Oregon. My plan has the option of running a 50k ~four weeks out from the goal race but I hadn’t settled on one until hearing about Silver State at the end of May.
I live in the foothills on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada which makes Reno somewhat local for me. This meant I was able to get out on the course for a 20-mile recon run last Saturday so I’d have a sense of what I’d be in for at Silver State. I’d hoped to camp in Truckee the night before the race to cut the morning drive to about a half hour but knew it’d be unlikely because of a scheduling conflict. (My friend Alex and I went to San Francisco on Friday to visit the Dudley Herbarium at the California Academy of Sciences to select specimens of Timmiella for a research project we’re doing on the moss genus.)
My alarm went off at 3:30 am on race morning. I put the kettle on the stove for coffee and started a pot of oatmeal. While the water boiled and the oats cooked, I added Hyperlyte to four bottles and then filled two of them with water. I stuffed the other two in my belt and then put everything in the crate of gear I’d packed the night before.
I left in the dark around 4:15, the porch light illuminating a swath of orange in my yard in an otherwise black landscape. I wound down into and back out of the South Yuba River canyon and then took Highway 20 to Interstate 80. I watched the sun rise over the Sierra Nevada and gawked stupidly in my car alone at the dense clouds of fog rising from their peaks and the alpine lakes in their basins.
An even denser fog rising from the Truckee River cloaked the transition to the high desert of the Sierra’s eastern slopes. When I came out the other side, the landscape had changed from chunky gray granite speckled with conifers and snow lingering in the highest reaches to red mountains covered with scrub. I made it to Rancho San Rafael Regional Park around 6:15. I grabbed my bib and when I got back to the car I saw I’d parked next to Jennifer Schmidt—a member of a running group in Auburn that I’m on the outskirts of who’d brought an ice bandana to use during the race. We chatted while gearing up and then went our separate ways to do our pre-race rituals.
We were off at 7:00. Adam Broderick set the pace off the front with Jacob Banta on his shoulder for the first mile. I didn’t have a time goal in mind for the day—my intention was to lean into racing at the front. Jacob took the lead after the first mile and I tried to get to his heel as we approached the climb up the Upper Evans Trail. I never quite made it to him—and I spent the next 16 or so miles watching him stretch his lead out until he was finally out of sight before the Sandy Hill climb.
I felt solid through mile 16. I ran every step of the first big climb up to Peavine Summit—~2,200 feet stretched out over four miles of mostly fire road. I sent it on the downhills after, still catching glimpses of Jacob rounding bends on the trail ahead of me. Around mile 16 I stopped at the aid station at the base of the Sandy Hill climb to fill my ice bandana and squeeze a few spongefuls of cold water over my head. Jacob had started the climb maybe 3-5 minutes before me but when the volunteers told me I had about 1,500 feet of climbing to the top, my morale dropped. I joked with them about it, asking them to tell me a lower number instead, then headed up the hill. The loose sand proved almost as difficult as they’d said—“Two steps up, a half step back.” I ran most of the first three miles in low gear but the last mile of the climb was the steepest with 700+ feet of gain. I spent a long 16 minutes contemplating power hiking while other 50k runners cruising downhill offered words of encouragement. Towards the top, someone running down told me Jacob was only about three minutes ahead—but I knew that couldn’t be true.
The volunteers at the top of Peavine filled my bandana and dowsed me with more water before sending me on my back down toward the finish. The last ten miles of the race were downhill with a few rollers in between and I felt relieved to have the longer sustained climbs behind me. I ran my fastest mile of the day immediately after my slowest—but by the time I left Peavine Road and dropped into the Bowl, my stomach had turned. I’d had about three bottles of Hyperlyte, a few more bottles of plain water, and two Precision 30 caffeine gels. I think the extra carbs in the caffeine gels were my downfall—they pushed me up to ~120 g/hr for each of the two hours I’d taken them.
I stuffed my last full bottle of drink mix in the back of my belt and just focused on getting water down for the last 6-7 miles. At the Ridgeview aid station (mile 26), the volunteers gave me the unsurprising news that Jacob had come through about 15 minutes before. I still didn’t know how far back third place was so I kept coasting down and hoped for the best. I crossed the finish line in second place with a time 4:24:36 after 31.87 miles and 5,190 feet of elevation gain (according to my Coros watch). I ran about 30 miles of the race alone, with second place mine to lose, never knowing how far back the runner behind me was until they crossed the finish line after me. It ended up being Jen, who broke the women’s course record that’d been standing since 2016 by five minutes with a time of 4:29:34.
This was my first time racing in the Hoka Tecton X 3 after running Way Too Cool 50k and Lake Sonoma 50 this spring in a pair of Adidas Terrex Agravic Speed Ultras. I don’t have much to say about the differences between the two shoes, but never felt off-balance in the Tectons—which is something I have experienced in a minor way with the Speed Ultras. I do think I would have had a harder time on the rocky downhills between the big climbs in the Speed Ultras. I imagine the mountain terrain could be similar at SOB 100k so I’m excited to see how the Tectons perform there.
My plan for the next few weeks is to experiment with adding plain liquid caffeine to my bottles of Hyperlyte to see how my stomach handles 100 g/hr. I’ve been leaning heavily on caffeine to keep my spirits high deep into my races so far in my ultrarunning journey, so I’m not ready to cut it out—but I do think it’d be a good idea t cut back. I’d also like to try to get a some steeper long climbs in on tired legs. The Sandy Hill climb was runnable and I hope to get to the point someday where I’d be able to make it up a comparable climb later in a race much more quickly. I’ve got five more weeks until the race and I’ll be trying to get in two 80-90 mile weeks before my taper.
Overall, I’m proud of my effort. I would have liked to have gotten more practice racing—pushing the limits of what I think is possible for myself while trying to keep the elastic tight between me and another competitor (or group) at the front of a race. But Silver State 50k is also a massive training stimulus that will pay off on the big day come July 12 in Oregon.