McNabb Fat Ass 50k 2009

Drove up yesterday morning to McNabb for the annual Fat Ass 50k. This is a no frills, no entry fee race up in rural Putnam County that starts at the jr. high, goes one half mile out and back, then five miles out and back three times for the 50k distance. I ran 15 miles here in 2006.

Ended up being a good run for me. It snowed a bit the first two hours, coating the road with about an inch of snow and thus softening the impact of the pavement. For not being a trail, the course is great. There are two decent sized hills at each end of the course where you come up out of the Clear Creek valley, but the middle miles are sheltered by being down in that valley and by the timber on each side of the road.

Got to run a bit with Mike Siltman and Jerry Davison. Overall, had a good run, stayed consistent for the most part and ended up running a 6:03. Bob Rehn does a great job with this. The aid stations were good ultra fare and there was (fresh) pizza at the end.

Good time.

I've been reading up a bit on the North Africa campaign after getting through "Land Warfare" by Thomas Dougherty. Dougherty's book is basically a historical overview of land combat in the 20th century, pretty straightforward, but got re-interested in N.A., which was an interesting theater of WW II for numerous reasons, not the least among them the tactics employed by Rommel and Montgomery, the unusual circumstances of desert combat, and the use of special forces, particularly by the British, particularly the Long Range Desert Group.

So far I've ready "Desert War" which is a part of the really, really great Time/Life series published in the 70's, "Desert Raiders: Axis and Allied Special Forces 1940-1943" by Andreas Molinari, and am currently plowing through "Killing Rommel," a novel largely about the LRDG. I have about five more books on my list--I'm particularly interesting in Popski's Private Army memoirs. Good stuff.