It was the second of March, 2024, at Old Pueblo 50, the final race of the Southern Arizona Triple 50. And it was time to bring it home.
I had mixed feelings going into this race. I enjoyed it when I ran it in 2020, so I knew I was going to enjoy it more than I did Oracle. But I also knew it was going to be another long, hard day, and I was worried about it. I was in better shape last time than I was this time, and I had really been cutting it close with my finishes with the other two races.
Somehow, in spite of all of that, I fell deeply in love with the race this time around, in a way I didn’t the first time I ran it.
A Long Walk In the Dark
Unlike last time, when Kris drove me to the race and dropped me off, I drove myself. I did not appreciate how many cars would be there, and ended up having to park very far away from the starting line. The race starts at 6:00 AM, which at the beginning of March means it is still dark. So that was how the day started for me, walking a long way down a dirt road, in a breezy and chilly dark morning.
I found Robin and we wished each other good luck for the race, and made our separate ways. I didn’t find Shannon before the race started, but we found each other almost immediately after we started moving.
Sunrise On Course
I don’t particularly love pre-dawn race starts, and I am definitely not a morning person, but I do have to confess that sunrise while you’re running a race is pretty great. Even if the selfie isn’t.
Back to Solo
Shannon and I didn’t run together very long this time, only about five miles before we separated and she pulled away. It was nice that all of these races had out-and-back parts of the courses so we could at least check in with each other again later on in the race. I love point-to-point races, but when you separate on those kinds of courses, you usually don’t see each other again until after the race unless something bad happens.
My Race Strategy
When I was looking at this race the first time, I laid out a pacing plan that ended up being way off base, particularly in some of the downhill stretches. I thought I would be able to make good time on them, and they ended up being much slower for me than I anticipated – they were steeper than expected, and the terrain was gravelly on top of hard packed ground. The combination of those two things made speed feel very precarious and I was worried about taking a fall, so I ended up taking longer than expected on those parts.
This time I had hard data on how to pace myself. I took the 2020 race and broke down the splits between aid stations, figured out what my average pace was, and – knowing that I was not in as good of shape this time as I had been last time – was going to try to stick as close to that as as I could.
With a strategy based on actually having run the race, I had better info and was able to make a better plan.
A Long Climb, and a Little More Climbing
When you read the runner’s guide, they warn you that it is nine miles to the first aid station at Melendrez Pass, and that much of that distance is climbing. So you might be like me and think that once you get there, you’re done with climbing. You’d be wrong. The dumb thing was (as I mentioned), I had done this race already, so I should have remembered the part where you leave Melendrez and keep going up. And that for a while, the quality of the trail through that stretch isn’t great.
Well, I had forgotten all that and kept waiting for the trail to start going downhill, and it kept on going up… for far longer than I liked.
Eventually I made it to the high point, crossed a saddle, and started going downhill, on my way toward the Mount Wrightson wilderness area.
The Bushwhack Bypass
For years, the Old Pueblo course has crossed a small corner of the Mount Wrightson Wilderness as part of the descent from Melendrez to the Cave Creek aid station. The wilderness portion is a distance of about 3/4 of a mile.
For reasons never disclosed to the runners, and from the sound of it possibly not to the race director either, they were unable to get the necessary permits for the wilderness area portion for the 2024 race, and so they had to come up with an alternative.
Thus, the stretch of the trail that I refer to as “the bushwhack bypass.”
Right before hitting the wilderness boundary, a faint trail peeled off to the south, and descended into a rough drainage, where it crossed back and forth across a rough creek bed for a while. The trail remained faint most of the way, so I was heavily relying on the marking ribbons hanging from tree branches to find my way. Eventually the flags led back up the hill and rejoined the usual course route. The total diversion distance was only about 3/4 of a mile, but it was slow going and I was glad to have it behind me… and not looking forward to coming back to it in another 20-ish miles.
It wasn’t a great piece of trail, but kudos to the race director for finding a workaround to their permit issue that was such a slight deviation from the main course.
One perk to the bypass: it was a shortcut of sorts. The original course distance was about a mile and a half, and the bypass cut that by about half. It wasn’t a big deal on loop one, but ended up being a plus on the way back. More on that later.
Down to Cave Creek and Beyond
Once the bypass connects back to the regular course route, the trail does a lot of descending down a steep jeep road. It’s the wrong kind of downhill, relatively smooth with a light sprinkling of fine gravel on top, making it prone to foot slippage. At least it’s challenging for me – my feet slipped a couple of times, but so far I have managed to avoid having a full fall.
As the descent leveled out, I reached the Cave Creek aid station, and passed on through to additional jeep roads pointing almost due west, straight toward Mount Wrightson. It is to me one of the most scenic views of the entire course. It’s also a long stretch of the course that is very runnable, so I made some time along it.
Eventually the road runs out and the course continues forward on singletrack, which loops back around to connect to another jeep road that heads east-ish over toward the Gardner Canyon aid station. From there, it diverts onto another stretch of singletrack that gets you the rest of the way there. There are several water crossings between Cave Creek and Gardner – in a dry spring they might be low or empty, but both times I have done the race the creeks have been running and I did a lot of water stomping.
This is one of the stretches (Cave Creek to Gardner Canyon particularly) that makes me love the course – singletrack is great, but when I’m tired and deep in a long race, I like letting my “technical brain” take a break on forest roads that are easier running. I really like the mix of the two they have put together for this race.
A Little Light Racing to Kentucky Camp
One of my other favorite parts of the course is in the stretch between Gardner Canyon and the turnaround point at Kentucky Camp. It’s another great view of Wrightson, but you don’t get it until you’ve done the turnaround and are heading back to Gardner. This time I knew it was there so I kept looking back over my shoulder to enjoy it.
I passed Shannon on her way back to do her second loop, but time was getting tight for me so our check-in was quick as we continued our ways. She seemed good and I was doing fine. A little while later, I passed Robin on her way out too. Another quick greeting (she was good too, but a friend who was running the race with her had taken a nasty spill and had dropped out).
I made it to Kentucky Camp with right about ten minutes to spare, putting me only a few minutes off my time from 2020, and I felt pretty good about that. I was in and out in just a few minutes, and from there the race against cutoffs was officially on.
Calculations
Now it was time to do it all in reverse. There were two cutoffs to worry about: 4:30 at Cave Creek, and 6:00 at Melendrez Pass (there wasn’t a cutoff at Gardner Canyon – that one was a freebie).
There’s a problem with those cutoffs, though. On the return trip, it’s six slow, mostly uphill miles from Cave Creek to Melendrez, and having an hour and a half to do it means you have to do a faster pace (about 15 minute miles) between those two aid stations than you have to do to get to Cave Creek (about 17 minute miles).
Put less technically, if you barely make the 4:30 cutoff at Cave Creek, you are very unlikely to make the 6:00 cutoff at Melendrez.
So I gave myself an unofficial Cave Creek cutoff time of 4:00 to make sure I had padding for the time I’d need for the climb to Melendrez.
The Grim Reaper Goes to Work
One of my biggest strengths as a runner is knowing how to pace myself, based on the course difficulty and how I’m feeling. I really felt that toward the end of Oracle Rumble as I managed to squeak through the cutoffs at the last couple of aid stations and the finish line, and I felt it again during this part of the race – but even more so.
I started to feel like the grim reaper. It wasn’t the first race I’d been to where people I passed missed cutoffs that I was making, but this time it was a lot of people, and not a single one of them made the cutoffs after I passed them.
As the afternoon went on, it started to feel weird. Maybe it was just my tired brain, but I started to feel like I was consigning my other runners to DNF when I left them behind, and I didn’t like that. So when I caught up to a runner who seemed like he had it in him to make it, I used my power for good and started pulling him along with me.
Climbing to Melendrez, the Other Way
I made my self-set 4:00 cutoff at Cave Creek and went on through to start the climb up to Melendrez. I knew it was going to be tough, and it was everything I had expected it to be.
The runner I’d picked up was named John, and here he started dragging. I still wasn’t sure I was going to make the Melendrez cutoff myself, but I was pretty sure that if John dropped back that he wasn’t going to make it.
He stayed with me for a while, but ultimately ended up dropping back. That was a bummer, because he seemed like he could do it. I gave him some words of encouragement, and he promised to keep pushing.
I continued the rest of the climb and dropped down and through the return trip through the bushwhack bypass. It was still slow going. Everything was slow going, and I was getting increasingly worried about making the Melendrez cutoff myself.
I finished the climb and started the descent back, moving as quickly as I could.
Saved By a Slightly Shortened Course
My pace had been below what I needed it to be to cover just over 6 miles in the time I had left. I was watching the clock and seeing the time tick down with dread.
The thing I had forgotten was that the bushwhack bypass shortened the distance between the two aid stations. It turned out that my pace was adequate after all.
I made it with about five minutes to spare. I came in hard on the heels of another runner who was just ahead of me and who was in and out of the aid station quickly enough that I didn’t see them. I just heard them arrive as I was approaching on the trail, and they were gone by the time I made it in.
If you haven’t done Old Pueblo before, and during the years when Bob Bachiani was the race director for it, you can’t appreciate what a wonderful surprise it was to hear “that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” shouted at me as I came running into the Melendrez aid station. When he was race director, Bob would stay at the finish line shouting that encouragement and congratulation to every runner that came in, and to me it was the sound of pure joy.
I did my usual rush through the aid station, grabbing the food I needed from my drop bag and letting the aid station volunteers refill my water, and as I was getting ready to leave, Bob asked me if I was going to finish the race. I laughed and told him that I hadn’t put myself through that whole day just to fall apart now, and he liked that. He sent me off with his other iconic phrase: “git ‘er done!”
Sunset on Old Pueblo
And so I set out, chasing the runner ahead of me into the sunset. I had three hours to run the remaining nine miles of the race, and that sounded just about perfect, right about the pace I’d been holding for a lot of the day. And this part had a lot of downhill.
It didn’t take me long to catch up to the other runner, and I don’t know why it surprised me at this point, given our close finishes in the previous two races – but it was Robin. Hooray!
We set out to finish the last race of the Triple 50 like we did the first.
A Runner Surprise
I felt like we would be coasting in, given the time remaining and the downhill course profile, but as we moved through the miles and the clock kept ticking, it didn’t feel like coasting was gonna do it. And so we pushed instead.
The sun set, and darkness came on. And just like my previous outing at Old Pueblo, it got windy in the dark. At about the 45 mile mark, the course starts a climb that takes runners up to the top of a hill and keeps them there for a while. It’s open and exposed, so on a windy night like that night, we got a nice cold buffeting for a while.
As we made our way down the far side of it, we noticed a headlamp up the hill behind us. We figured it was sweepers coming up behind us (especially for me, given my experience with the sweeper in the final miles of Oracle Rumble) and continued on. We made it down off of the singletrack and onto the forest road that meant we were in the final few miles of the race.
The headlight behind us caught up to us there, and it was John! He said that he had missed the cutoff at Melendrez, but they asked him there if he still thought he could finish. He told them he could, so they gave him a pass and let him go. And here he was! I was really happy to see him again.
The End
The three of us ran together for a little while, but eventually that ticking clock made Robin and I nervous enough that we felt again like we needed to push it a bit, so we told John what was up and he continued at his own pace, but kept pretty close.
We passed where my car was parked and still had a long way to go. I was not thrilled about the idea of having to turn around from the finish line and come all the way back to it.
And eventually, finally, we made it to the downhill road taking us the final yards back in to the finish line. Robin fired up a finisher’s sprint and pulled away from me, so I let her do her thing and I did mine.
My official time was 14:54, and I was not last this time. John came in about 20 seconds behind me. On top of that, because Old Pueblo lets runners take an optional early start if they think they might struggle with the cutoffs, he wasn’t last either. There were actually two other runners with finishes listed after ours because they were over 15 hours.
After The End
Robin and John had rides waiting for them, so they headed back up to the main road and were off. There was a propane heater at the finish line and I sat in front of that to get warmed up before tackling the long walk back to my car.
The race workers noticed me hanging around and checked on me to make sure I was okay. I assured them that I was and explained what I was doing, and they offered to drive me out to my car. I gratefully accepted.
So I snacked a bit and soaked up the heat, and when it was time for them to pack up the heater, they put me in the cab of one of their trucks with its heater on.
When they were done and had taken me back to my car, they agreed it would have been a really long walk for me to do alone in the dark and joked that it would have been another 5K added to my total for the day.
Southern Arizona Triple 50, Done
From there, I made my way back to my nearby campsite. There had been little fanfare – just me and Robin congratulating each other – but I was still happy. This one was a long time coming, and I felt a big sense of accomplishment for finally having completed it.
