2021 Nighttime Festival of Happy Little Hills - You get a DNF, you get a DNF, I get a DNF, we all get DNF!

Good grief, dude, not another LoTR themed race report? Yes but why? Because this race is unnecessarily long? Why are these people speaking gibberish? There's that old guy from the other LoTR race report? We've had one LoTR race report, what about second race report? Lonely Mountain with promised treasure that instead turns into a disaster? Yes, that one, that's the ticket.

The Nighttime Festival of Happy Little Hills begins, like the Hobbit, with an unexpected invitation and unwelcome visitors. JK @syvie! But it does start with a plotting old madman. Even before my move down to SoCal was final, I already started plotting ways to find the steepest, gnarliest trails around. The Chumash Peak trail may not be the worst or the best, but it's out there. And if it's there, why not climb it? And if it's worth doing once, it's worth doing 10 times. That's what I learned from THNGVBD. Hopefully that lesson does not apply to marriages, though at this rate, my wife may disagree.

The Chumash trail climbs 1,250 feet in just 1 mile. As bad as that sounds, ...well, it is as bad as that sounds. It also descends 1,250 feet in a mile. This little dwarf of a mountain can present a Balrog of a challenge if done hard and long enough. That's what she said.

Elrond: So this is your purpose; to enter the mountain

Thorin: What of it?

Elrond: There are some who would not deem it wise

The race was on Ultrasignup for weeks, yet only 5 souls even considered it. In the hours before the event, two would reconsider their sanity, if not their mortality. We're not all elves, nor are we going to be one hundred and eleven even if our lower backs feel like we are. Speaking of which, my lower back seized up slowly and then suddenly two days before the race. I could barely roll over in bed. How was I going to climb 12,000 ft?

Comrade in arms, if not battered bodies, @sylvie joined for at least a go at the fun run. Little did she know, there is no fun run here. Sure 3 loops of the Barkley or 5 time up Dogmeat is fun, but 5 times up the 'mash, and you'll want to check in at the M*A*S*H. If you want to have fun at the Chumash trail, stay at the bottom, and act as aid station captain, like Spot did. If you didn't have fun on your first ascent, you won't find it by doing any more. Scott, or is it Michael, or is it Michael Scott, was the third and final contestant. Not having ever seen the hill before, he was as eager as a @sylvie is with unlimited breakfast burritos.

Although billed as a night race, we started in the late afternoon and got in two loops before sunset. Thanks to our injuries, both @sylvie and I took it easy, especially on the downhills. Hilariously, while in most runs, an easy pace might be 10 min/mile, on the Chumash downhill, that is a blistering unsustainable pace. No, we jogged the mile downhill in 15 minutes. We serendipitously stumbled on the strategy that everyone else already knew about. Save the quads on the downhills for later uphills. Oh we ambitious kids still have much to learn.

Thorin: I'm sorry I doubted you

Bilbo: No, I would have doubted me too

By the third time I reached the summit, much to the amusement of passing hikers seeing me for the umpeenth time, the sun was setting on our adventure. Not saying it was over, just saying the sun was setting. And what a sight. Watching the sun setting on the horizon, the orange glow in the clouds, the sea and the marshes, with the distant islands covered in mist, it was as spiriting as holding the ring and the arkenstone simultaneously. 

By my third descent, I was growing uncomfortable with the state of my spine. The nerve pain from my lower back to tailbone was jarring on every left step. Every right step too. Enough that I'd completely forgotten that I'd rolled my ankle and hobbled 7 miles the week prior. That's the great thing about injuries, and bad movie sequels too - the pain of the one you're dealing with now makes you forget about the pain of the previous ones. Similarly, this is what I call a fast type 2 activity. The suffering you go through in one lap, in retrospect will seem really fun by the time you do your next lap. Well, that my friends, like the three part Hobbit movies, is my unnecessarily long winded way of saying that I DNF'ed my own race after a measly 3 and a half laps. @sylvie did 4, and Scott did 5. So much like the dwarves at the end of the Hobbit movies, we're all equally last place. haha.

Someday, someone is going to come out here and do all 10. I sure hope it's not me, because then I'll have to keep coming back every year. At least until I'm one hundred and eleven and then I can disappear.