The lanterne rouge is the competitor in last place in the Tour de France. It’s a phrase that comes from the French for “Red Lantern” and refers to the red lantern hung on the rear vehicle of a passenger railway train or the brake van of a freight train, which signalmen would look for in order to make sure none of the couplings had become disconnected.
The Southern Arizona Triple 50 isn’t a stage race, but it’s a cumulative effort (and time) across three 50 mile races run in a 3-month period, so I feel okay invoking a term from the Tour here. It’s more elegant than the usual trail running phrase of DFL (“dead f-ing last”), and if you’ve ever come into an aid station or finish line as they are already in the process of shutting down at night, the image of a last light hanging in the dark feels appropriate. That was a scene I saw several times on my journey to being the lanterne rouge of the 2023-2024 series.
In most of the ultras I’ve done, I’ve finished toward the back of the pack, and I made peace with that a long time ago. I like the company there and it’s a great place to make friends. Sometimes it’s a good place to help other runners out, too. Finishing dead last was new to me, though, and was definitely not the plan when I started the series.
For good or ill, I decided to just train for this series by feel rather than drawing up a proper training plan. The last time I had tried a proper plan was when I started training to do Whiskey Basin in the spring of 2023, and my plan was too aggressive and I ended up (mildly) injured and cancelled my registration. I wasn’t exactly coming in to this series “off the couch,” but my running volume had been fairly low and easy, so my plan was to build easy up to Colossal Vail (“CV” as the locals call it) and treat that as a training run to do the big build for the remaining two races. I was confident I could manage CV okay – it was the later two races I was concerned about.
I ended up coming into CV undertrained, which again is not totally unfamiliar territory to me, but it ended up being a rougher day than I’d expected. The upshot of that was that I spent several of the six weeks we had between CV and Oracle Rumble just recovering, and by the time I was in good shape again, it was essentially time to taper for Oracle. It didn’t leave much of a window for training that would have time to be beneficial for Oracle, but I felt like I got a little bit of useful work in.
I came out of Oracle better than I had CV, and my recovery was much quicker, in spite of Oracle being a much more challenging race. So to some extent, my plan seemed to have worked. But the time between Oracle and Old Pueblo, the final race of the series, was a mere four weeks. So it was, again – and even more so – recover into taper. I just did very moderate training between those two races.
And then of course I ultimately made it through Old Pueblo and finished the Triple 50.
All three races were a struggle, in different ways for each one. I had been better trained when I made my 2019-2020 attempt at the series, which I felt was pretty ironic as I squeaked through my finishes – particularly at Oracle, which was the race I dropped at during my earlier Triple 50 attempt. So I came into this attempt at the series physically less ready than before, but I guess mentally more so and that really was what made the difference.
There were a couple of disappointments in the way it all wrapped up. The first was the conclusion of Old Pueblo, because the 50 mile finish was different than when I did it in 2020. In that race, the (at the time) race director, Bob Bachiani, stood there at the finish line cheering everybody in – and shouting out the Triple 50 finishers specifically. It was a bummer to find out that wasn’t a tradition that had carried on when I came in for my finish.
The other was that at the Triple 50 finishers’ celebration dinner the group photo that was taken never got posted to the finishers page on the Triple 50 event website. I can take consolation from the fact that when I made my earlier attempt in 2020, Covid shut down the world just a couple of weeks after Old Pueblo that year, and they didn’t have a finishers’ dinner at all.
Overall, I’m happy with how it all went. It would have been nice to have been ahead of cutoffs more, but I’ve never run a race on grit and experience and problem solving as much as I did these races, and it was good to see that I could deliver even on days that were not my best days. I made a new running friend in Shannon, and it was really great to get to do the series together with my niece and friend Robin, who did Colossal Vail as her first 50 miler and then took on and beat two advanced-level races after that to complete the series. We ran the last miles of both Colossal Vail and Old Pueblo together, and were only a few minutes apart for the finish at Oracle Rumble.
It was awesome.
