Race Report: Tally In The Valley 6 hours (2018)

When your 50-miler training schedule calls for a 50km run four weeks in advance of your race, you sign up for a “pre-ultra-ultra-training-run” race.

The inaugural Tally in the Valley weekend put on by Happy Trails Racing is the perfect race for a “pre-ultra ultra training-run race”. The various timed events (24hr, 12hr, 12hr night, 6hr, etc) are perfect for managing your distance and testing out your fitness. If you’re feeling good, give it a bit more gas and get a further distance. If you’re taking it easy, or if the day isn’t your day, keep the loops easy and breezy and still come away with a sense of accomplishment.

The course is a 7km loop in Dundas Valley, which means a stocked aid station every 7km, and that water faucet near the main train station/park entrance for topping up your handheld bottle. The rail trail portion gets hot as the day goes on, so that water faucet is an oasis on the later loops.

I figured I could knock off 49km / 7 loops and keep a sensible pace, without undoing the last three months of training. Once I got moving, things were great, the trails are fairly easy - wide track and nothing technical.

The loops and the hours passed, and I was having the time of my life. Got to run a few loops with the lovely duo of Jennifer C and Amanda P (thank you ladies, you’re both a total delight).

My Salomon Sense Pros were a bit too over-engineered for those types of trails, so somewhere around 28-35km, l swapped them out for my Adidas Adios. Which are basically socks with a rubber coaster on the bottom. I brought them to wear post-race. They are light and fast, and to me they are perfect little no nonsense speed demons. All my road racing PBs have been set in the last four generations of Adios.

After the shoe swap, I had gotten through 42.2km in just over 4 hours, so with two hours remaining, I decided pick up the pace. Because hey, why not speed up once you’ve just run a marathon. At one point on the rail trail, I was in the zone and passed someone, and they said “jeeeez you’re moving”, I looked down at my watch and I was running a sub-5:00min/km pace. That’s bonkers. Don’t do that, that’s how the wheels fall off. Thankfully, they didn’t and I rocked on.

At the close of the 6 hours, I had run 56km and took 3rd place among the ladies, and 5th overall. Yikes, that’s good stuff for a “training run”. The training from the last few months was definitely paying off, but in all seriousness, I think I only got that distance because of the sheer joy of the entire thing. Happy Trails put on an absolute dream event. The Gong Show is a riot. The positive energy of the Gong Show runners is infectious. Shout out to post-race hangs with Kelly (may our paths continue to cross at more of these wild events). The volunteers are guardian angels. And above all, Jeff and Heather are the absolute finest at what they do. Greatest admiration to them and all the hard work that they put into their events, it not only shows, you feel it.

And major props and applause to Sue the photographer. Extremely talented and a radiant beam of sunshine. Embedded below is my favourite running photo ever (side note: my second and third favourite running photos are also photos captured by Sue).