Just the facts:

5K time = 27:04 – 5K place = 180/1080

Half Marathon time = 2:09:37 – Half Marathon place = 963/4925

This was my fourth consecutive year participating in the Golden Snowflake Challenge where you run a 5k on Saturday and then come back on Sunday and run the Half Marathon, It is also the 9th time that I have run in this race so usually I would skip the race report as it is the same as every year but this year was an test of stamina in ways I would not know…………

Having run the Chino Hills Trail Race Series 30k the prior week this was just going to be a fun run weekend at what I consider my favorite race of the year. This is my favorite because I just love the course; where else can you run on a drag strip, by an airport and around a lake all in the same run? 

Anyways I showed up Saturday morning for the 5k and decided to see if I had any speed in me so I did a 1-mile warmup, I usually need 2 miles for a 5k but I missed timed everything and only got 1 mile in before the race was supposed to start. I had to line up in the back because of this so I was stuck with the walkers and stroller pushers, oh well I decided to just have fun and jog it at that point. It was a nice easy run, came in around 27 minutes which is about 5 minutes off of my best time. I chalked it up as being a good warmup for tomorrows Half where my goal was to get under 2 hours which is a pretty attainable time for me. 

After the 5k I had a full day of laundry, cleaning the house and going to the market, the usual weekend stuff. Took it easy that evening and went to bed at 10pm, I stayed up later than usual as this race didn’t start until 8am and I am only 30 minutes away. At 10:30pm I saw my phone ringing and went to answer it, on the other end was my manager informing me that our wireless controller upgrade (I’m an IT Network Engineer by trade for Keck Medical Center of USC ) did not go well and a lot of the wireless access points did not come back on-line. By a lot he said 115 of them. That meant 2 things, one was a lot of the hospital was without wireless and two, I had to go in and help recover them. I live only 15 minutes from work (I know, Lucky) so by 11pm I was there to see what was up. What was up was that a bunch of wireless access points got corrupted during the upgrade and we would have to put a recovery image on each one so it could then upgrade to the newest version of software. 

This wonderful task involves taking each access point down from the ceiling, connecting them to a laptop, re formatting the AP, copying the recovery image to them, putting the AP back and let it boot up and upgrade. This process takes around 20 minutes per AP so this was how I was going to spend my night. So on and on it went, at this point I was thinking of skipping the Half since it looked like we would need to work about 24 hours straight to get to all of them before Monday. It was around 4am I thought of a crazy Idea, if my co-workers were cool with it (there were 3 of us working overnight) I could still go run the Half and then come back to work later Sunday to finish up. They were ok with it so at 5:30am I left and went home to change into my running gear. I tricked myself into thinking that this was the perfect opportunity to test if I could endure a true Ultramarathon that would require being up for a long time. So at 6:30am I found myself in the parking lot of the Pomona Fairplex seeing if I could get a quick 45-minute nap in as I was going on 24 hours of no sleep already. I wasn’t able to fall asleep so I just rested my eyes until 7:45am where I sleep walked my way to the start line. 

At 8am the start horn went off and away we went, I don’t remember much of the race except the weather was perfect, crisp and cool with awesome views of the snow covered mountains and the shimmering water on the lake. I’ve done this course so many times I knew every crack in the road and every uphill and downhill so I knew how to pace it perfect. I thought I would be too exhausted to run the whole thing but as I settled into my easy run pace I actually woke up around 5 miles into it and was able to keep it up all the way to the finish. 

After the race, I skipped the beer tent (I know, crazy right!) and drove home and promptly passed out. I had tickets to the LA Charger game but had to sadly cancel as I had to go back to work later. After getting around 4 hours of sleep I went right back to work. We were able to knock out the remaining AP’s before Monday!  

So now you all know about the weekend that I ran a 5k, worked all night, then went back to run a Half Marathon, all told I went about 30 hours without sleep which I think is a record for me. 

Sleepy Alan

Till next time, see ya!