Continuing on my theme for the week, ultra trail running, ( http://www.6inchtrailmarathon.com ) I want to discuss perhaps the hardest start to a race I have ever experienced. Yes,  the infamous Goldmine Hill. This is where Dave Kennedy, the Race Director,  starts the 6 inch ultra marathon, at the bottom of said hill. I say hill , it must be pretty close to a mountain if you ask me. ! I still remember the first time I ran (maybe ran is a bit optimistic, staggered better describes my traverse.) up Goldmine Hill. It was 2009 and I had entered the 6 inch ultra for the first time. Back then it was a fat ass (free entry and self supported) and had a starting line up of about 20 I think.  We started at 4am but it was still pretty dark. (I think we had daylight saving at the time?) Anyhow up the hill (mountain !) we went, the twenty of us. Having made no effort to look at the course or elevation before the race you can imagine my surprise when faced with this 2-3k steep incline. I eventually got to the top absolutely  ‘cream-crackered’  (knackered) and I remember thinking what the hell have I let myself in for, if this was the first 3k and I still had 43k to go !

Unfortunately it got worse not better as we got lost and ended up running 50k instead of the course 46k so myself and Brett finished middle of the pack. This was due to a ‘random’ Tiger snake at a left turn that is now named ‘Big Kev’s Corner’  and normal has a picture of yours truely, Dave taunting me. I told you Dave is evil. To this day I swear he placed that Tiger snake there on purpose. I just can’t work out where he carried it for the first 17k of the race ? I digress, as always, so I will continue. There was no medal at the end just a stagger back to the car and a slow drive back to Perth. The race went so badly I actually tried to cancel my flight to South Africa the following year to run my third Comrades, ( http://www.comrades.com ) I was that beaten. Luckily South African airways wouldn’t refund me the coast of the flight so I ended up going to Comrades and having a great run for a Silver medal. (finishing quicker than 7hrs 30 minutes gets you a Silver, I sneaked in for a 7hr 22minute finishing time.)

I have returned to the 6 inch every year since 2009 and even went on a few recon visits in between races in the early years. I still get lost and wear two gamins, one for pace and the other for directions, but even these don’t help and I still make the odd detour now and then. Will I get lost on Sunday ? I’m not confident either way really, that’s what makes trail running so challenging, you never know if you’ll even find the finish not matter get a good placing !

To further compound my theory about Dave Kennedy not being a nice man a few years ago, under the pretence of some work being done on the original part of the course, Dave found a hill that in my view could double as a wall! This bad boy is unclimbable on the way up and suicidal on the way down. Oh did I forget to mention Dave makes us run up and down this hill (wall), not content with one way, he likes to double the chances of a fatal injury. As I already mentioned in a previous post it was on this hill (wall) that Jon fell in one of the ruts and it was so deep it took him a few attempts to get out, while another friend of mine Michael Barton jumped over poor Jon stuck in the rut and continued on his merry way, probably laughing all the way to the top of the hill (wall).

The final peace de resistance in Dave’s catalog of pain is the final two kilometres of the race, a single track in dense forest that I swear never ends. It’s like a stuck record playing the same song over and over, you know you’re moving forward but you never seem to get to the end of the trail and the waiting finish line. You can even hear the cars so you know the road is close but still you seem to keep running, and running. I tell you that Dave Kennedy is an evil man.