Out of the Darkness & Into the Bighorns 55K Ultra - Ten Sleep, Wyoming

Elevation Range: 4485' - 8740'............. Elevation Gain/Loss: 6015'/5093'...........RESULTS

July 6, 2024 - I ran this event because of its proximity to where my son lives and because it is a worthy benefit for suicide prevention. Beginning at the logging road south of Hyattville, the race follows an easy to navigate dirt road the first 23 miles up into the red desert foothills and amazing rock formations to gaze over the expansive and awe-inspiring Big Horn Basin, where we could see all the way across to Yellowstone and Teton National Parks before we headed up into the Winter Elk Range in the Big Horn National Forest. From the top of the Big Horn Mountains at Battle Park we dropped down into southern drainage for two miles on the road that leads to Deerhaven to Dry Ten Sleep aid station before heading down the very rocky FS Road 413 to single track consisting of cow paths through the sage and aspens before a steep descent down to Highway 16 where we crossed over to Old Ten Sleep Highway for a sustained dusty 6.5-mile downhill run to finish at the Ten Sleep Hatchery at the bottom of Ten Sleep Canyon.

After driving nearly 1900 miles to bring my son home the previous three days, my legs were anything but prepped for an ultra trail race. For the previous four weeks I was still recovering from the heat of Snow Peaks 50M in Utah and a tendon injury in my left foot. I can't say I was completely rested or certainly not healed, so I knew going into this one that I would be running on experience and memory instead of training... since I hardly ran at all for four weeks. But no worries, really.

Sunrise right before the start at 0600 was a nice light show. The field was small and we all enjoyed the light show as we stood around waiting for the start out in the wide open prairie. Right from the get-go, my gastro-intestinal tract announced that I needed a pit stop right away, so I managed to pull over into the sage a half mile into the race and watch as the others stretched out down the road. Once I got that squared away, my legs quickly reminded me I really needed to take it easy to warm back into running after a month off.

So it seemed to take me forever to pull back runners and catch up to the race. Of course, I made up my mind that I was going fast enough at a 15-minute average pace that time constraints were not going to be an issue, so there was no hurry to catch up. I stopped frequently to capture photos of the landscape and enjoy myself. I really was not all that psyched about racing, but I was enjoying discovering new country.

By the aid station at 13 miles I had only caught 4 people. I sat down for five minutes or so and just chatted with the aid station volunteers. It was pleasant. It took me about 17 miles to work through my lack of fitness before I broke into another level and could apply myself to running more strategically - not that it mattered - everyone ahead was way out of range of catching by this point. My biggest problem over the first half of the race was a persistent problem with visual acuity that I generally don't experience until the last exhausting miles of a race. On this day, I couldn't see straight from the first mile until about 17 miles before the problem cleared for the rest of the day. It is like running cross-eyed. Best I can tell, it is from a brain injury I sustained when I was 25. There is no uniform image, so it is a nuisance and forces me to slow down and exercise more deliberation with each foot placement, which I had to do anyway to assuage the tendon injury in my left foot.

So I started to race more in earnest during the second half of the race. Got to see three young elk bulls in velvet run across the road in front of me and a screaming eagle circling above while running below Battle Park, so that was cool. After leaving the road and hitting single track on a major rocky descent and cow paths I was glad to have normal vision back. I had to be very attentive to trail markings as there was a good chance of getting off course - as it turned out about half the field did. I stayed the course as marked, however inadequately, made it down to the highway, crossed over and closed the last seven miles in about 85 minutes - pretty good for an old guy on a very dusty road due to weekend traffic in temps approaching 90 degrees at the end of a 34-mile race, finishing in 8th place of 16 finishers in 9:35 for 55K. (It is only fair to note that had others not gotten lost, my placement would not have been in the top ten. Oh well - route-finding is just one of the challenges of trail racing. I succeeded and they didn't. There have been days when it was me who got lost, so it's all part of it.)