Not your typical race report.
Brutal course that beat me the hell down (odd year direction 2023). This may have been the hardest race of the black list series in my opinion – mainly because the long stretches without the ability to crew – this was pretty new to me. Thankfully, I finished with two other runners (Colleen and Jill) 8th, 9th, and 10 in about 15:20:00 – we ran with each other from about mile 10 or so all the way to the finish. I would have finished a lot slower if it wasn’t for y’all , thank you
Would I recommend black forest 100k? The reason I ran this race was because of the blacklist series, and it was a blast running it. I am still sick of rocks, roots, and rolled ankles and am really looking forward to getting back into road races. Whenever I come to peace with the 3 R’s lol, I could see myself running this series again. At the same time there’s so many other races out there I want to run.
Would I recommend the blacklist series? If you want to push your limits, get beat down, with an amazing community then i’d say go for it. This series was a blast, the community is super dope, I even threw Ironstone 100k into the mix for some good “night training” (Ironstone is in july, just before eastern states 100 mile and starts at 2 pm, you go through the night, and I never ran with a headlamp in the woods at night… it is DIFFERENT – and the training was excellent.)
Race info
Here are some notes I took:
- Bib pickup: saturday 10 – midnight at pavilion 1 at Hyner run state park
- Starts: 12:01 am sunday morning pavilion 1 at Hyner run state park
- Cut off 7 pm sunday night
- No crew no pacer, drop bags accessible at every aid station
- 13,400 feet of gain
- Make $50 donation or do the 8 service hours
- Gpx file for odd year NEED THIS
- Get pic of aid station chart – store this in phone – ab 12 miles apart
Thoughts on the race
- Long stretches between aidstations and no crew so buddying up helped me alot, and I assume would help others a lot too. Of course the hard part for me was keeping pace with these other runners because they were FAST. I didn’t want to lose them though and run this thing alone so I opted to hang onto their shirt tails and fly like the wind…man did that hurt.
- Make sure to have a GPX File, and check it frequently because not every turn is marked. Specifically this one time we turned hard right at the bottom of a descent when it was more natural to go straight, we actually went past the turn by about .2 miles. When in doubt, take a knee, and figure it out… I learned this lesson the hard way by going 3 miles off course down a 1,000 foot descend during world’s end 100k…
After Action Report
What went well
- I didn’t run out of water (carried 3 liters total). So, I started off by carrying 2.5 liters, but with the coolness of the night I only drank about a liter by the time I got to the first aid station. (remember we started at midnight) I had another .5 liter water bottle that was empty, and eventually filled this up at aidstation 3 to use as “emergency water” (which I ended up using)
- Ran with a train of people the whole time. It started out as a big train of maybe 10 people and then slowly dwindled down to just three of us…two other black list runners
What Didn’t
- Quads hurt by mile 20 and completely blown out by mile 30 due to some big descents (2023 opposite direction)
What would I do differently?
- Maybe start off a tad slower and add some walking in so my quads don’t get as blown out. By mile 45 It felt like my pain tolerance meter was broken, the pain was real, I felt bad for moaning and groaning the last 50k because it had to have driven Jill and Colleen batshit crazy lol, the pain was almost too much. It wasn’t injury pain though, just worked muscle pain.
- I sometimes try to run anything under 100 miles as fast as I can and I always pay for it. 100k races are long and I can start to run them with more wisdom vs youth.
- Train my lower quads better (Leg extension machine). Update 2 weeks after posting: Doing this 2x per week now, feeling strong, exactly the spot that I need to strengthen.
Anything crazy happen?
- Rock climbing – I’m not sure what mile this was at, maybe close to 35? That’s just a guess. There was a section and we were climbing up the face of a mountain, over top of these big boulders, it was almost like we were rock climbing. This would have gotten old fast, but it was just a short punchy section so it ended up being kind of fun – not running up the mountain but climbing.
- Rattlesnake – around mile 60, there was this mature pissed off rattlesnake in the middle of the trail slightly to the left. This snake was as thick as my forearm. The 4-foot wide trail had bushes all over each side of us so we couldn’t really go around this rattlesnake with what felt like a safe enough distance. We actually ran up on a runner in front of us who was waiting it out a few minutes before we got there. We tossed a small stick to the side of this snake to see what it would do… bad idea. It got even more pissed off hissing so loud the woods felt like they were rattling. This threw a monkey wrench into our plans because we were trying to run a race, time was ticking, but like wtf. We decided to backtrack a few paces, and after about what felt like forever but was probably only three minutes, the snake moved over enough into the side of the bushes to give us enough room – maybe 7 feet – to sprint as fast as we could on the opposite side of the trail to pass this snake. It’s funny, we all kind of “jumped” over the area the snake was near like this little jump thing was somehow going to save us if it were to lunge…. This shot all of our adrenaline up for about 5 minutes and we hauled ass down this descent, nothing seemed to hurt anymore but this was also short lived. Back to the pain cave for me, thankfully with only a few more miles left.
PS the black list is Hyner 50k, World’s End 100k, Eastern States 100 mile, and Black Forest 100k
Joe DiAndrea 