Event 48 was the 3rd race (for us) in the Portland Trail Series in Forest Park. As you (of course) recall, these runs are held on Wednesdays in the evening. And this time of year, it's a'gettin' dark before the start of the race. But we learned our lesson from last time! Yessirree, we sure did. This time we brought our handy dandy headlamps! All prepared, just like Boy Scouts!
Yeah, except here was our conversation prior to leaving the house:
'Ya think the batteries are okay or should we change them out?'
'They should be fine, don't you think?"
'I guess so. We haven't used them that much, I guess.'
Yeah, they should be just fine.'
'Awesome! Let's go!'
Oy.
As stated above, it was pretty much dark before we even took off to start this thing. The course was just under five miles and we felt this would be plenty easy enough. Yes, it was Forest Park so there would be plenty of up and down, but 4.something miles - pffft! Piece of the proverbial cake. Or 'pie', for my wife.
The course started up Leif - okay, visible enough even in the waning light. No twisted ankles, feeling good. Then we veered off, up Wild Cherry and it was all over. In the trees, it was dark! Camera Crew was in the lead as we started the first climb up the hillside. We got about halfway up and she turned on her light. I held off, using the glow from her headlamp and the line she was picking up the trail to guide me. But soon enough, that wasn't really working for me. I turned my lamp on, stopped running for a moment, then held my hand up in front of my lamp.
Okay, it was on but not putting out a lot of light. Hmmmm. I thought at first that maybe it just wasn't all that dark and so it just was too early to do any good. But then I looked at Camera Crew's light and realized hers was a lot brighter than mine. Insert joke(s) here re: intelligence, brain, etc.
After a quick consultation and realizing that it was getting damn dark, we tried swapping one AAA battery of the three in each (Camera Crew's idea) and that really helped. But unfortunately it still wasn't enough. We came to the conclusion that we were pretty much done in. Camera Crew was doing okay; I couldn't see shit in front of me and kept finding the edge of the singletrack trail as I moved forward. Yep.
Fortunately, there was a battery salesman on the trail... just kidding. Fortunately, the route for this evenings run was a sort of figure eight. Started up Leif, a loop up and back down the hill to Leif and down toward the start, then another loop up and down, to Leif and the finish. Well, we were still on the first loop and couldn't see much of anything. We made the command decision to cut the route short, opting for safe rather than sorry. We got back to Leif and headed toward the finish, skipping the turn off for the second loop-de-loop. Even on Leif, which is a gravel road and not completely covered, we still had trouble seeing our path. A couple of times we wandered toward the edge of the road, one of us pulling the other back as we made our way down.
The race coordinator still counted our times, which was nice of her. Apparently, some others had issues with the dark. We still covered three+ miles and so also made the decision to still count the self-shortened run as an official event in the 50@50 Project. Don't judge. We didn't see YOU out there. Of course, we couldn't see anything, really. For all we could tell, everyone we knew was in Forest Park that night!
So, yeah, fresh batteries would have been awesome.
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