State #8

Bib

Quick update since it’s been a while.  Money started to get tight in 2015/2016.  Then I started to eat poorly again and stopped running nearly altogether.  Then I decided I wanted to visit Europe at the end of 2016.  After a long delay, I’m feeling it again and started running again to finish the year and have some plans for 2020 if things go smoothly.  So to get the new year started, I’m going to recap a race I did back in 2015.

So they call it the New Mexico Texas Challenge, but unless it originally began as a race from New Mexico to Texas, I’m not sure why they still call it that because none of the races go into Texas at all.  They’re ran exclusively in New Mexico, just northwest of Hobbs, which is an interesting town.  After driving through hours of basically desert, Hobbs was a welcome site as it was quite a busy city, basically paid for by oil money, which in 2015 was still pretty good but I can only imagine what it’s like now.

A little quirk is that the town is basically located on the state line which is also a time zone border.  So I had to remind myself several times that all times were supposed to be mountain time and not central.  Which was good because it meant that it definitely wouldn’t be dark at the start of this race.

Start Line

The weather started off cold, about 35, but it was a very dry 35.  And it warmed up very quick as the sun came up.  By race time, it was easily 50-55 and by the finish, it was probably nearing 70 so it was quite comfortable.  I did have to use sunscreen for this race because most of it was ran in the desert with little to NO shade.  I applied sunscreen two different times especially in the last half of the run.

The 5K saw a good number of runners, but the half and whole marathons only had 100 or so max.  The half had 74 actually but I believe the whole had a few more.  And I’ll spoil it now, I finished near the end of that pack.  But since we started a little after the whole marathon and we ran a different route, I did get joined by a few marathoners towards the end of my race.  Otherwise I would have been alone.  This was definitely the smallest race I ran and there were a few times where I felt like I was about to be totally alone but it was never really bad, although it does hurt with motivation, because there’s just nobody around pushing you.  Luckily there was a little older lady marathoner who got me going again in that last mile.

All in all, it was a nice race with a pretty good finish line and recovery items.  I only stayed for a few minutes before changing and then heading out to drive to Van Horn, Texas.  That’s where I spent the night the night after and set out to hike up Guadeloupe Peak, the highest point in Texas.  Made it up in roughly 4 hours and back down in another 2.5.  This was a very adventurous trip out to West Texas and SE New Mexico.

Race: New Mexico Texas Challenge

Date: April 18, 2015, 8AM

Place: Hobbs, NM

Time: 2:53:55