100 miles is a lot. It’s far, it’s intimidating, it’s difficult.

The Bad Dawg Ultra is an easy 5 miles out, 5 miles back, with aid stations at both ends and in the middle. The course begins and ends with a big hill. The elevation profile makes it look downhill out and uphill back. That description is technically accurate, but not complete. How can I describe it? The uphill parts get steeper and longer as the day goes on.

The weather was brutal. The “feels-like” was well over 100⁰ Fahrenheit all day. They say it was record breaking. I don’t know. Maybe? Running in that heat and humidity certainly wasn’t comfortable.

For most of the race I was handling myself well. I never lost my appetite. I was drinking fluids. I felt good. I was having fun talking to the other runners and volunteers.

I sat and relaxed at the aid stations, trying to stay cool-ish. There was really no relief from the brutal heat. There was a slight breeze sometimes, which was nice. I kept telling myself: when the sun goes down, then it will cool off. Just keep it together until night.

Night came, the sun went down, and whatever drop there might have been in temperature was cancelled by a dramatic increase in humidity and a complete lack of any kind of wind.

It was a dark and steamy night…

So I quit. I got back to the start/finish and begged Sydney to not send me back out there.

She took me to a nap area and had a medic look me over. The professional advice was that i was suffering from heat exhaustion. After a nap, we got in the car and got out of there. We decided we can pick up our gear in the morning.

In the end, out of 30 starters only 5 finished the 100 mile race. Good for them, they are much tougher than i am. I eventually recovered.

This was very humbling. I still have a lot of work to do if I’m going to finish the 2 big races in October.