Boucles de la Tourlandry - a nice, short and muddy nightly trail!
A quick one as I recently ran this night "trail" near my house.
Motivation and choosing the race
I was looking for a short-ish race to run in December, but the 20k race I was initially looking at was complete, so I signed up for les boucles de la Tourlandry instead (litteraly: Tourlandry loops).
They had different formats:
- on Saturday: a 12k night trail,
- on Sunday: 5 and 10k (road), as well as trails of 17k and 24k
I signed up for the Saturday one: the start time was at 6:30pm, which meant I could leave my home around 4:30pm, and be back around 9pm (I had about 1h driving one way).
Arriving
I arrived about 1h before the start, picked up my bib, discussed a bit with the staff, and then went back to my car where I rested a bit, before putting my gear on.
The weather was pretty nice: we would be running by night, so I had my headlamp, but the forecast was 10 degrees Celsius, with no rain nor snow (I kid you not, they had snow at that race the year before!).
The Race
Elevation
The elevation was pretty low compared to the last trails I ran - don't forget I live in a pretty flat region, so 180m of elevation was in fact not too bad ;)
Here's how the route and elevation looked like:
There were around 200 persons registered, and I had the bib number 038:
Start
The nice thing with "small" races is that you can park nearby - which proved useful 10 minutes before the start, when I decided it would be a good idea to go back to my car to take some tissues, just in case.
Then I went back to the start line, and the race started right on time.
First 5k
I didn't really have a target for that race, but since it was a 12k, I thought it would be nice to finish it around 1h, so a pace of 5' per km.
I managed to do that the first 5k as they were flat:
However if you paid attention to the elevation profile above, you should have seen that there was a "hill" around km 5: a whopping 60m elevation! :D
I was happy with that pace, as the route was extremely muddy: I was glad I wore "proper" trail shoes (my NNormal Kjerag), as a lot of runners showed up with road running shoes, and struggled in those muddy sections.
Of course there were also a lot of watter puddles, but I didn't really care: with such a short distance, being wet didn't matter at all.
Second half
I was obviously a bit slower in the second half, but I still managed to overtake a couple of runners in the uphill and dowhnhill sections - I guess my trail running training paid off.
While in the first kilometers, there were a lot of runners, in the second half as usual in any race, the queue was a lot more spread out.
Last kilometer
When I was 1 kilometer away from the finish line, I noticed a headlamp behind me coming closer and closer - the guy (or lady) behind me clearly wanted to catch up, so I decided to speed up as fast as possible as I didn't want him to pass me over :)
Still, he passed me just before the finish line - we finished 2 seconds apart ;)
Wrap Up
I finished 48th overall, out of 182 runners - not bad, as that means I was in the first quarter of finishers.
It felt good having a bib again, and challenging myself on a (much) shorter distance than the ones I did in the past 2 years.
I already registered to a 20k in January in Le Mans, and very much look forward to it!