The muddy parking lot the morning of the race.

Sloppy the night before the race.

I tried to be even more focused on efficiency at aid stations this year than last, spending little more time at each one than it took to have a water bottle refilled, grab a couple energy gels ( Carb Boom , not my favorite, but what the aid stations offered), and throw out my mess of sticky gel wrappers if I remembered. I also forewent my beet juice plan (chugging some beet juice just before the start and then starting the race with a water bottle filled with mostly beet juice) that I tried to employ last year and apparently didn’t do much good. I used my standard fueling plan that has worked pretty well for me for anything up to a 50k. I ate a gel just before the start and then another basically every half hour. Thankfully, it worked well for me this year and I never had any signs of bonking or just feeling completely depleted.I ran the early road section harder than I ever have in three years of partaking in the Hyner 50k festivities. I also attacked the climbs in what felt like it may be a risky pace for a tough 31 mile trail run, but I put a lot of faith in the extra gym training I had started at the end of 2018. I really was banking on all of those stair stepper and inclined treadmill sessions paying off on this day. Since this is the first time in years I had incorporated any kind of gym workouts into my training, I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, but was hoping to see some benefits. The last secret to improving my time was to run the downhills faster. It sounds simple, but a lot of people struggle with downhill and worry (with good reason) about blowing out their quads due to hammering the descents to hard. For me, downhill running has always seemed to come pretty naturally and I’ve never been too afraid of a nasty fall to try to make up some time by hitting the downhills hard. As tough as I find the climbs at Hyner, the descents are the opposite for me. In my opinion, nearly all of the downhills at Hyner are nontechnical and super runnable, which is perfect for me. The real blessing about the whole situation is that with the race being only a 50k, who cares if you blow your quads up. It will be over before blown quads really matter that much.With that philosophy and planning, I cranked the miles out on race day feeling good physically and mentally all day. Hyner is always fun as it is the first race of the year where I see and get to catch up with many of the other trail ultrarunners I have gotten to know over the past few years and haven’t seen or talked to (outside of Facebook) since the previous season. Since I was feeling so good and enjoying the trails so much while racing, I really didn’t look at my watch too often to check on my pace. I checked often enough to know I was close to my 2017 pace, but that was about all. My final race goal before the finish was to run, not hike, the final, steep ascent just before the finish line is in sight after the road section. I was pulling it off until I was about halfway up it and hit a slick spot where my foot flew out from under me and I had to throw my hands out to avoid face planting into the trail. Undeterred, I attempted to continue running it, but my other foot slipped as well. This happened for at least a full three strides where it would have appeared to an onlooker that I was doing mountain climbers in the middle of the trail. After exhausting the last of my efforts with muddy mountain climbers I gave up trying to still run it and got myself some secure footing. Once past that steep, slick patch I hiked a few steps disappointed with the outcome and then switched back to the fastest trot I could manage after giving it all I had to get nowhere just before the finish.After finishing I learned my official time was 5:32:31. At the time I knew it was faster than my 2018 time which I was happy about, but for some reason I thought I had run it faster in 2017. I continued to believe this untruth all the way up until I was putting together the data for my split times for Table 2. I was comparing the cumulative times from 2017 to 2019 trying to see where I was faster each year. While doing this I finally realized that my total time in 2019 was less than in 2017. Thinking I made a mistake somewhere in my data entry into Excel, I checked my results on Ultrasignup. Sure enough, plain as day, I was about four minutes faster in 2019 than in 2017. It only took me about a month and a half and examining a spreadsheet to realize it, but when I did it sure was an awesome finding. The real beauty of it is that it sets me up so nicely to accomplish my overall PA Triple Crown Series cumulative time goal (see Table 1) for my 2019 season! Additionally, I found out the weekend after Hyner that I had achieved my other goal for the race when I was able to get a new road marathon PR at the New Jersey Marathon! I’m super proud of how those back to back weekends of racing turned out. They both felt like real successes to me and an excellent start to my race season!Scott Snell