2009 LT100

Last year's problems:
1. Poor sleep the weeks before and no sleep the night before.
2. Injured my ankle on Sugarloaf coming down Powerline road.
3. All aid station trasnit times sucked!
4. My left knee was going out after Halfmoon (69.5M)

This year, I slept well. Even the night before the race, I was parked in the forest uphill from Leadville somewhere amongst mines and got a good 7 hours of sleep.

I managed to sprain my left ankle twice (same one I sprained at Estes Park), but neither was a factor.
My aid station times were decent. Most could've been better, but some of my aid stations times were only a few minutes. My longest times were when I was being helped.
I had several sharp pains on the sides of my knees, and it felt like I had shin-splints. How do you get shin-splints running mountainous trails?

The weather wasn't totally bad all the time, but it was bad enough. It rained, it hailed, it snowed. I don't know what made it harder - the extra weight of cold/wet gear or all the slipping and straining during injury-avoidance. It was hard. Roughly 2/3 of the starters DNF'd. I saw three different guys limping to the next aid station to DNF. One was on his elbows and knees yelling, both in pain and frustration.
I decided to be safe and stick to a 28-hour plan. That plan had some minor flaws, but I've edited for next year.
I was doing pretty good, until after Fish Hatchery (76.5M). That's when a situation developed. So very sorry, but this event will have to remain a mystery to my readers. Suffice it to say that my event was "altered" and there wasn't anything I could do about it. This event robbed me of at least 45 minutes and involved an extra .86M of decent/climbing on the worst parts of Powerline Road.
It was raining and cold and dark, but I was determined that even if my LT100 was trashed, I was going to go as far as legally possible. Since I had checked out of Fish Hatchery, it was legal for me to go to Mayqueen, even if I arrived very late. So that's what I did.
This was very heartbreaking to me, but shit happens and I'm not going to cry over spilt milk.
The official DNF distance was 86.5, but after adding the back-tracking, I actually went 87.4M. That is a distance record for me.
Unlike other DNF's that sting from failure, this one had nothing to do with me giving up.
So on that note, in spite of things not turning out anything like I had planned, it was still very fun.

I had the usual serious pulmonary edema. My legs were strong, but I couldn't get any oxygen to them. I collapsed in coughing fits a few times.
One weird thing happened up on Sugarlaof. It sounded like a woman who was barely alive trying to say, "Help," but it was so weak. I was shining my flashlight into the trees but saw no one. I heard it three times, but with one deaf ear, I can't hear in stereo and it difficult to figure out where sounds are coming from. Then I realized the sound was coming from the weeze in my windpipe.

Right now, the thing that hurts the most, believve it or not, is my left eye. It never bothered me in the race, but I woke up from my post-race nap and I could barely use my left eye. It feels much better to keep my eyelid closed. I've got some anitbiotic eye drops. I hope that helps.