2012 Kings Mountain Marathon - Racing in the southern hills

Misty sunrise in my hometown
Rows of cotton 'bout knee high
Mrs. Baker down the dirt road
Still got clothes out on the line

Over a beer with Jefferson and Jared it was decided that running Kings Mountain Marathon was a terrific idea. Why this decision was made still escapes me… This seems to happen to me a lot, and I never learn. There are worse choices to make, right? At least that’s what I tell myself.

Through the winter Jared helped our friend Jefferson, the race director for Kings Mountain Marathon, do some advertising for the race. They carefully crafted a challenge for participants to try and beat Jared as he attempted his first marathon at Kings Mountain, and by the middle of January it was written in stone and live on the interwebs. Speaking quite honestly, I had agreed early on that I'd race, but hardly expected the whim to come to fruition. I secretly hoped for injury or something to come up to preclude me from racing that weekend, but nothing came. Dammit. On the first day of February I conceded defeat and told Jefferson that I would in fact come down to Clover, South Carolina and race.

Rumpus in the Bumpass International Tri - 2012

First race of the season. And… go!

In the months preceding Rumpus I was thinking, “Yeah, I’m going to start training so early and be so ready!” 

Yeah, not so much. 

With a nagging hip flexor and some IT band issues, I definitely didn’t do as much preparation as I wanted. Instead, my idea was working on plain fitness and technique. During the weeks leading up to game day I did a lot of trail running (serendipitously – I’ll get to this later) and some open water swimming down at Lake Anna to help reacquaint myself with the water. Beyond that and commuting to work on my bike, I barely got out. Alas, it was time to try out all the new upgrades to Valeria:

bike pr0n.

Coming off a pretty good end to my 2011 season, I wasn’t sure what my goals would be. Would Rumpus be more of a practice triathlon to see where my baseline is? Hmm. Really, I just wanted to have a fluid race, just keep up with the pack, and not screw up any of my transitions. This was also my first race with the High Cloud Foundation. The sheer excitement among the Dream Team as race day drew closer was off the charts. Although fellow teammate Alex Nickodem and I were the only High Clouders racing the International distance race, we were still well supported by the rest of the Foundation.

The drive down Friday night was uneventful at best and was elongated by the usual Friday evening rush hour traffic, but I was fortunate to have a friend from DC Triathlon club, Adam Stolzberg, to keep me entertained. We met up with some other DC Tri guys, Ryan Troll and Ben Winterroth, at a restaurant for a pre-race meal of pasta, bread, and maybe some more pasta! Wait... where are the carbs? There was no pasta to be found in the entire establishment. A sweet potato and some biscuits were about as close as we could get. After a disappointing meal we stop by a grocery store before arriving at Russ’s house for a good night of sleep.

This is where things got interesting (no, not like beer and pillow fights).