The last couple of days have been all about getting things prepped for the Johnson Branch Trail Race in Valley View. We spent time organizing the storage unit and getting what we needed squared away for the day on the trail. Since we first started mounting trail races in this area I was injured, my role in these events usually focuses on user experience (communicating with runners before the race, packet pickup, day of reg, timing etc.) so I’ve continued in that role as part of the directing team. Ben marked the course yesterday and I helped Tony get the truck loaded and headed out to the State Park to run packet pickup while the other guys finished marking.

Things were pretty slow yesterday but picked up this morning and we ended up with 68 runners on the course for the day and some pretty good times hanging out at the start/finish while waiting for runners come in. I had a chance to support runners as they were coming through and had a chance to talk with other race directors who came out to support us. I talked with Anne, one of the RD’s for Blaze Trails, for a while after she finished her half marathon and it was nice to connect with her and her husband Chris. I’ve volunteered, timed and ran their races over the years and they’ve volunteered and ran our races and we always have good conversations, today was no different. I felt supported and heard and understood.

The day started out really beautiful and warmed up quite a bit to the point where I actually just took my shirt off and worked for a while. I haven’t EVER felt comfortable doing something like that and I while I had a second of “what am I doing?”, it wasn’t something that stuck around. I accepted what I needed and went with it. After we broke everything down and got it stowed, I headed back to town to try and take a nap. Last night I went over to the Spiderweb HQ housewarming party for a bit with Matt but headed back really early to get sleep ahead of the 3:30AM wakeup that these days require. By the time I got back, I was pretty buzzed from the day and finally napped around 5:00 for a bit.

Here is the fucked up part: when I woke up from my nap I felt like shit. Lonely, down and pretty much just blasted from everything. Erica had a potluck I wanted to go to but I just didn’t have the emotional energy to be around that many people again. I figured I should probably just eat something and maybe that would help. I ran over to Applejacks and picked up some beer, ordered a pizza and hopefully things go up from here.