Catie Sanchez's Staging Area

Evergreen calls this “intermediate” which means that all of my trail training runs were “beginner” 🥲because I definitely underestimated how much trail would be in this trail run! It was also suuuper muddy and rainy, you had to hop on logs and slippery rocks (all of which they advertise ahead of time, and I don’t know why but I didn’t listen 😂). All in all it was a lot of fun, very well organized race by the folks at Evergreen as always, but if you’re just dipping your toe into trail runs (like me!) then try to do a practice loop a few weeks out from the race so you know what to expect!

This was my first ultra and first trail run, so I don’t have a lot of reference points, but to me it felt pretty average. The location is very pretty but unfortunately we were completely enveloped in fog until about four hours into the race. The course is three laps — for the first two, there were plenty of volunteers helping to point you to the trail, but by the time I had got to my third lap, the volunteers were gone! I had to double back a few times, or wait for other runners, to make sure I was still on the path. The course marking was great in some spots, but not very good in others 🙁 after the race they had pizza, chocolate milk, Oreos, candy, and bananas. There was only one aid station (and then the starting line), so you could get water every ~5 miles or so. This worked for me, but I did see lots of people carrying their own water too. There was one very steep uphill and one very steep downhill. The downhill felt kind of dangerous – lots of tree roots. They had ropes you could use to guide yourself down, but for the first two laps, there were multiple people trying to use the ropes at once, and it was a bit chaotic.

Orca always has well organized races. This course is nice because you have all the (gradual) uphill upfront, and then can coast on the way back.