Lake Michigan Trail Half Marathon Race Recap

Sep 11

Written By Laura

When I signed up for this race, I thought "How different can trail running be from road running?"

These are a fool's thoughts!

I decided to do this race partly because I had heard good things from the running community about it, and partly because our Oiselle Volee team leader in Wisconsin had a discount code for me to use. :)

The Lake Michigan Trail Marathon hosts 4 distances:

- a half marathon

- a 20-mile training run

- a full marathon

- a 50K

The longer distances started earlier and were staggered, with the 50K runners starting first around 6 am , and the half marathoners starting at 7:30 am.

The night before, I sat out my Flat Laura in preparation for the following morning. I just got these Asics trail running shoes (Gel-Venture 5) and was excited to see how they stood up to the trails.

I also have to give a shout-out to the wonderful people at ArmPocket. My old armband fell victim to being peed on by a visitor we had at our house the week before and I needed a replacement before my race. After contacting them on Twitter, the lovely customer service people upgraded me to 2-day shipping so that I would for sure have a new armband in time for the race!

I thought it was so cool that my bib number was 414. Represent!

The weather all week called for that day to be hot and humid. I was hoping that since we were starting early, the humidity would hold off.

That was also a fool's thought!

It was already almost 70 degrees when B and I arrived at Sheridan Park in Cudahy at the start. Of course, while I was getting ready to head to the start line, my bluetooth headphone didn't want to sync. (User error, not the fault of the headphones!)

Sheila (our Oiselle Volee team leader for WI) and I took a pre-race picture. She had her wisdom teeth out the week before so she was gonna walk to race. She wished me luck and headed to the start line while I continued to mess with my headphons.

The course was absolutely beautiful. How I felt during it was NOT beautiful. This was the first time I have run a race without any music. I felt challenged from the get-go both mentally and physically. I have run races in heat before where the runners have been yellow-flagged and told to slow down. But the humidity was killing me. I don't think I've ever drank as much water during a race as I did during this one. Running on trails is different, physically-speaking, from road running. But I figured since I wasn't going to try to get a good time, I could take lots of walk breaks and take pictures (like the above one, that was about mile 6.5).

The last three miles were all in the sun, no shade to be found, and right along the lake. At the last two aid stations, I was handed "water" by the volunteers (bless them for standing out in that humidity) that was actually Sword, a sports drink that tasted like crap. Both are clear so I can't blame the volunteers for mistaking them.