Short version: I finished in 7:14, roughly forty minutes slower than I'd planned, and about four hours of that was fine. The other three were an education.

I've now run four of these and this was the first where I hit a wall so hard that I lost the thread of the day entirely. I want to write it down carefully, partly because the log is the point, and partly because the mistake was so obvious in hindsight that I'd like to make it harder to repeat.

The course

Ridgeline is a 50K with about 5,400 feet of gain, run as a lollipop out of a trailhead east of Sisters. The first eight miles climb steadily through pine, then you pop onto the exposed ridge that gives the race its name and stay up there for a long, rolling, entirely shadeless stretch before dropping into the loop.

It is a genuinely beautiful course and it is also a solar oven from about 10 a.m. onward. Everyone tells you this. It's in the race guide, in bold. I read it and understood it and still did not plan for it properly.

Splits

Look at that third row. An hour fifty-eight for 6.8 miles on the least technical section of the entire course. That's the whole story right there.

What I got wrong

I ran the first fifteen miles at an effort that was completely sustainable at 55°F and completely unsustainable at 84°F, and I did not adjust when the temperature did. My pacing plan was built off a training block run mostly at dawn. The race started at 6 a.m. and by the time I was on the exposed ridge it was four hours later and roughly thirty degrees warmer, and I was still running to a number instead of to how I felt.

Compounding that: I was drinking plenty of water and taking almost no sodium. I had planned for about 400mg an hour and was actually getting maybe 150, because the drink mix I'd packed tasted revolting warm and I quietly stopped using it around mile ten without ever consciously deciding to.

The failure wasn't a decision. It was the absence of one.

That's the part I keep coming back to. I didn't choose to under-fuel. I just stopped doing something unpleasant and never noticed I'd stopped. Four years in, and the mistake was still that basic.

The twelve miles

From roughly mile 16 to mile 27 my memory is genuinely patchy. I know I sat down at least twice. I know I had a long, sincere internal debate about whether I could sleep briefly beside the trail and then continue, which I recall as reasonable at the time. I remember being passed by a lot of people and not caring, which is unlike me.

What I actually remember clearly is arriving at AS3 in bad shape and a volunteer — a woman in her sixties in a bucket hat, whose name I never got — taking one look at me and saying:

You don't need water. You need salt and you need to sit for four minutes.

She handed me a cup of broth and two salt tabs and physically pointed at a camp chair. I sat. She timed it. When I stood up I could think again. Not immediately — it took another mile or so — but the fog lifted, and the last five miles were the fastest running I did all day relative to effort.

If that volunteer ever reads this: you turned a DNF into a finish and I've thought about you approximately once a week since.

What I'm changing

• Sodium goes in a form I'll actually take. Capsules, not drink mix. Something I can swallow when nothing tastes good, because at hour five nothing will.
• An effort ceiling, not a pace target. For hot races I'm capping by breathing and perceived effort through the first half, and I'll accept whatever pace falls out of that.
• A fifteen-minute check-in. A watch alert that just asks: have you eaten, have you taken salt, are you hot. Three questions I demonstrably cannot be trusted to ask myself.
• Heat training that isn't optional. I did all my long runs at dawn because it was pleasant. That was training for a race that doesn't exist.

The finish

Theo and June were at the line, June barking at a stranger's dog and Theo holding a folding chair and a bag of salt and vinegar chips, which is the correct thing to bring to an ultra finish and I will not be taking questions.

7:14. Fortieth-ish in my field, though I genuinely didn't look for a couple of days. Slower than I wanted and a much more useful race than the smooth one I was hoping for. I've had races where nothing went wrong and I learned nothing at all.

Back to easy miles for two weeks, then the fall block. There's a December 50K I've been circling.

I get asked about lifting more than anything else I write about, which surprised me, because my program is so boring that describing it out loud feels like a prank.

Here it is in full: I go twice a week. I do five movements. I've changed almost nothing since 2022. That's the post. Everything below is just the reasoning.

The five things

Two sessions a week, both the same, roughly fifty minutes each including the part where I stand around. I alternate which movement I push and which I take easy depending on what running week I'm in. That's the only variable.

Why it hasn't changed

Because it works, and because every time I've been tempted to make it more interesting, the interesting version has been the one I skipped.

There was a stretch in 2023 where I found a much better program online — periodized, six movements, accessory work, a spreadsheet with tabs. I lasted five weeks. It wasn't harder physically; it was harder to start. Too many decisions between me and the first rep. My actual program requires no thinking at all, which means the only thing standing between me and a session is whether I get in the car.

The best program is the one that survives a bad week.

What lifting actually did

Some honest accounting, because I think this gets oversold in both directions.

It did not make me fast. My 10K time is essentially unchanged since 2022. Anyone telling you the squat rack will fix your speed is selling something.

What it did do: my descents got dramatically better. That's the one enormous, unambiguous change. I used to arrive at the bottom of a long technical descent with quads that were completely finished, and now I don't. On a course like Ridgeline that's worth more than any amount of aerobic fitness, because the descent is where you can lose twenty minutes in a hurry.

Second thing: I stopped collecting the small nagging injuries I used to get every autumn. I can't prove causation — I also started sleeping better and taking off weeks in the same period — but four years without a soft-tissue problem after three years of constant little ones is a pattern I'm not going to argue with.

How I actually fit it in

Tuesday and Friday, 6:45 a.m., before work. Not because morning lifting is superior but because at 6:45 a.m. nothing has yet had a chance to go wrong. By 5 p.m. there are seventeen reasons not to go, and every one of them is legitimate.

Both sessions sit the day after an easy run, never the day after a long one. On a heavy running week I cut the sets rather than skip the session — two sets instead of three, lighter, in and out in half an hour. The habit survives even when the training doesn't.

If you're starting

• Go twice a week and don't negotiate. Twice is enough to progress and few enough to protect.
• Pick five movements and keep them for a year. Genuinely a year. Boredom is not a signal to change anything.
• Start lighter than your ego wants. I started the squat with an empty bar for three weeks, and the only cost was that I felt silly.
• Get someone to watch you lift once. One session with a coach at the start is the highest-value money I've spent on any of this.

Four years, roughly four hundred sessions, no interesting stories. That's sort of the point.

Ground rules, since they matter for whether any of this is useful: I buy everything myself, nobody sends me anything, and there are no affiliate links on this site. If something here sounds like praise, it's because the thing survived a genuinely unreasonable amount of use.

I'm deliberately not naming most brands. Models change every eighteen months and a recommendation from 2026 will be actively wrong by 2028. What holds up is the reasoning, so that's what I'm writing down.

Things that lasted

The vest — five years, ~3,000 miles

I bought a 12-litre running vest in 2021 on clearance because it was the only one in the shop in my size, and I have used it for every long run and every race since. One bottle pocket has a hole I've stitched twice. Everything else works.

What made it last, as far as I can tell: it's mostly one piece of fabric. Very few seams, no zippers on the shoulder straps, no removable parts to lose. Every vest I've seen fail on someone else failed at a zip or a clip.

Merino socks — four years each

I own six pairs and rotate them. Four years in, two pairs have gone through at the heel. I've spent more on a single mediocre restaurant meal than these cost per year of use, and they're the single item I'd tell a new trail runner to spend real money on first.

A £30 headlamp

Bought for one winter, still going after four. It's not bright enough for technical descending at speed, which is a genuine limitation, but for early morning fire road and general "it's dark for the first forty minutes" use it has never once failed. I've watched three people with much more expensive lamps have battery problems in the cold while this thing kept going.

The cheapest possible GPS watch

Mine cost about a fifth of what the popular ones do. It tells me pace, distance, elevation, and time, and the battery lasts about eleven hours, which covers everything I do except a hundred-miler I have no plans to run.

I've now watched this hobby's gear costs escalate for five years and I remain unconvinced that the top-end watches change anything for a mid-pack runner. They give you more numbers. I already ignore most of the numbers I have.

Things that didn't

A pair of much-hyped shoes — 200 miles

Failed at the upper, on both shoes, in the same place, well before the midsole was done. This was a shoe with an enormous amount of online enthusiasm behind it and it is the shortest-lived pair I've owned. I don't think it was a defect; I think it was a shoe designed for a race day and marketed for everything.

The lesson I took: enthusiasm online correlates with how a shoe feels in the first fifty miles, which is not the same as how it holds up in the next five hundred. Nobody writes the six-month follow-up.

A waterproof jacket that wasn't

Expensive, extremely light, kept water out for about one season before the face fabric wetted through in anything sustained. I've since learned this is more or less expected for that category and that the very light shells are trading longevity for weight in a way that isn't always disclosed. My replacement is heavier, cheaper, four years old, and still dry.

Basically every gel I tried before I stopped

I spent two years assuming I'd eventually find a gel I could tolerate at hour four. I did not. What worked was real food — boiled potatoes with salt, and those little rice cakes you can make the night before. This is very unglamorous and it is the only nutrition advice I've ever given that a reader has written back to thank me for.

What I stopped buying

• Compression anything. Tried it for two seasons, noticed nothing, stopped. Others swear by it. I'm reporting my own null result.
• Running-specific sunglasses. Cheap ones work identically and I lose them less painfully.
• Recovery gadgets. I have a foam roller from 2019. It's fine. The thing that actually works is the off week.
• More than three pairs of shoes at once. I used to rotate five. It made no difference except to the number of decisions I had to make on a Tuesday.

The actual advice

If I compress five years into one paragraph: buy good socks, buy a vest with as few moving parts as possible, buy shoes that fit rather than shoes that are recommended, and be extremely suspicious of anything whose main selling point is that it's very light. Weight is almost always bought with durability, and for people running mid-pack over many years, durability is worth more.

And then stop. The gear is not the limiting factor. It is very rarely the limiting factor. I say this as someone who has spent many pleasant evenings reading reviews instead of going to sleep at a reasonable hour before a long run.

In February 2023 I had a stress reaction in my left tibia. Not a fracture — the stage before it, the one where the bone is telling you clearly and you still have the option to listen. I got eight weeks off running, a lot of time on a stationary bike, and an unwelcome amount of time to think about how I'd gotten there.

The answer was not dramatic. I hadn't done anything reckless. I had simply run a moderately increasing volume for fourteen consecutive months without ever taking a genuine down week, because every time one was scheduled I felt fine and skipped it.

What an off week actually looks like

Every seventh week, I run roughly a third of my normal volume, no long run, no vert to speak of, nothing that requires a plan. I keep the two lifting sessions but drop them to two easy sets. I walk a lot, because I like walking and June still needs to go outside.

It is not a rest week in the sense of doing nothing at all. It's a week where nothing is hard and nothing is long, and — critically — where I've decided in advance that this is the plan, so that feeling good is not evidence that I should abandon it.

Why "I feel fine" is the trap

This is the part I'd most like to get across, because it's the thing I misunderstood for three years.

Feeling fine on the Monday of a down week means the down week is working, not that it's unnecessary. Fatigue in endurance training is cumulative and lagging; by the time it announces itself clearly, you've usually been accumulating it for a while. I spent years treating "but I feel good" as a reason to run the long run anyway, which is a bit like deciding you don't need the brakes because the car is going fine.

Feeling good in week seven is the outcome, not a reason to cancel it.

The part nobody mentions

Off weeks are psychologically unpleasant in a way I didn't expect and haven't fully solved.

Running five days a week is, for me, load-bearing for my mood. It's how I process a bad day at work, how I get outside in winter, how I keep a reasonably even keel. Removing most of it for seven days means I'm often a bit irritable and at loose ends by Thursday, and it took me a couple of years to stop interpreting that feeling as evidence that the off week was wrong.

What helps: planning something else into the gap. I read more. Theo and I have a standing thing where week seven is when we cook something ambitious on a weeknight. June and I take long slow walks that would be too slow to count as anything. The week works much better when it has a shape of its own rather than being defined by absence.

Three years on

Since I started actually taking them in mid-2023, I have not had a running injury. Not one. I've had a cold that cost me a week and a rolled ankle from a rock that was genuinely not my fault, but nothing from load, which was previously an annual event.

I have also, and this surprised me more, run more total miles per year than I did in the years when I never took a down week. Fourteen months of unbroken training and then eight weeks off is a worse annual total than six-week blocks with a light seventh, every time. The math is not subtle once you write it down, which I eventually did, because I make charts for a living and it was embarrassing that I hadn't.

If you want to try it

• Schedule it before you need it. Put the whole year's off weeks in the calendar in January. Deciding in the moment doesn't work — I have four years of evidence.
• Make it a third, not zero. Complete rest makes coming back harder. Easy short running keeps the habit alive.
• Tell someone. I tell Theo. It's much harder to quietly run seventeen miles on a Saturday when someone will ask you about it.
• Expect to feel restless. It's not a sign it isn't working. It's just what it feels like.

I still don't like off weeks. I take them anyway, which after four years I've decided is a good enough relationship to have with a training tool.

In 2019 a coworker was one person short for a five-leg relay and worked her way down the org chart until she got to someone who didn't have a good excuse. That was me. I ran 4.2 miles, walked most of the last one, and spent the following week convinced I had done permanent damage to my knees.

Six weeks later I signed up for another one. I still can't fully explain that part.

What this blog is

Base Miles is a training log I keep in public. It started in 2021 as a private spreadsheet, became a blog when I realized I was writing paragraphs in the notes column, and has stayed roughly the same ever since: what I ran, what I lifted, what went wrong, and occasionally a longer piece when I've been chewing on something for a while.

It is not a coaching site. I'm not qualified to write you a plan and I'd do a bad job of it. What I can offer is five years of one person's honest notes — including the parts where I got injured, lost motivation for four months, or DNF'd in front of my husband and my dog.

The actual details

I'm a GIS analyst for a regional water district, which means I spend my working hours in elevation models and watershed boundaries. This is relevant mostly because it has made me insufferable about trail grade and because I make my own course maps, which several of you have told me is the best part of the race reports.

I live in Bend with my husband Theo, who does not run and thinks all of this is very funny, and a border collie mix named June. June came from a shelter in Redmond in 2022 with the stated warning "high energy," which was the understatement of that decade. She has accompanied me on roughly two thousand trail miles and has never once been tired at the end of one.

Roughly where things stand

I run five days a week when things are going well and three when they aren't. I lift twice a week, the same handful of movements, and have written about why that's the entire program over here. Every seventh week I take an off week, which I resisted for years and now consider the single most useful thing I've changed.

Why it's public

Accountability, mostly. It is meaningfully harder to skip a week when you've told a few thousand strangers you're going to run it. But also because when I started, the running internet felt like it was either elite athletes or transformation stories, and I badly wanted to read someone in the middle who was just — going out consistently, for years, without it being a redemption arc.

So that's what this is. Mid-pack notes from a person who kept showing up. If that's useful to you, I'm glad. If you're new and it all seems impossible, I'd point you at the 2021 archive, where I am visibly bad at this.