Post Lake Tarawera

Its 4 days now since I finished the race. We got home late last night and it felt good to be home again.
I've really struggled with that calf since the race and have been feeling pretty low about it. I planned on taking 3weeks off running after this race except for the odd run on the weekends so that actully helped as I'm no pressure to get back into it too early.

At first when I finished the race and up until Monday I was thinking I'd had a pretty crap run. I was thinking how I had blown up and I should've been at least 1hr quicker finishing, but the more I've thought about it the more I've thought it was actully a pretty good result. I was running comfortable for the first 20k and felt like I could've ran all day then a twinge out of nowhere in my left calf forced me to drop back the pace and with 30km or 40km of tree roots to run through my calf just got worse and worse. I was on the verge of doing a dnf at 60km but somehow I could not do it.
I'm not too sure what happened but my calf came good in stages after that. Managed to work my way up through the field again. So to go from running with the top end of the field to dropping back to around 30th then to work my way back to 7th I'm now thinking "that's pretty darn good!"

One of the great things I found with this race was all the people involved and all the runners that I was running with from the top group to the mid pack who passed me before I passed them again who came and congratulated me when I finished.

I guess the thing with ultra running not everything goes as planned and you need to be ready for some misfortunes. I can think about how I could've gone that 1hr quicker if that calf behaved and how I could've done this and I could've done that but I did the best I could under the circumstances I was in and I've got to be happy with that.
I was lucky I didn't have to dnf as alot of runners did. I was lucky to get a top 10 placing against some of the worlds best trail ultra runners, I was lucky to encounter some of the best trails to run on with an elite group of runners.

Yep I didn't have a crap race...I had an AWESOME race!

Next thing now is to get this calf good and get race fit for TNF100