Smell What I'm Stepping In: Dick Collins FireTrails 50 mile Run

This race last year was my second 50 mile race and I finished in 9hrs and 49min and I remember the hills being a real challenge for me late in the race. Having ran another 50 miler, a couple 50ks and a 100 miler I felt a bit more confident and knew what to expect this time around. I think I set myself up with some lofty goals before this race though. Not necessarily goals that can't be reached but goals where I definitely need to put in some work to achieve them. I don't know why I feel the need to improve so drastically from race to race but I always feel like it could be possible with hard work, which is good, I guess that means I have a bit of confidence in myself. So my lofty goal going into this race was to finish the 50 miles and almost 8000' of elevation gain in under 8 hours. So basically that boils down to averaging about 9:30's over the duration and I figured that was something definitely in my grasp.
The race starts down at the Lake Chabot Marina in Castro Valley, Ca and travels through a few parks that are parallel to the bay up to about where Berkley is, then you turn around and travel almost the exact route back with the exception of rounding the lake on the other side from which you start. The course is pretty awesome because you get a good mix of paved road, fire trails and some beautiful single track. Going through all the parks is neat because they're all different, starting from the lake you see small shrubs and a few trees scattered around grassy picnic areas. Then as you leave the lake area you travel into a more forest like park that is really green with trees standing 30+ feet overhead and lots of ferns and moss growing everywhere, in that area there is some good single track that winds you up and around the hills then spits you out onto a road crossing. Once you cross the road you are immediately thrown into a different terrain , where the hillsides have little to no shade from trees and its no longer as green. Upon hitting the turn around its starts getting warm and returning to the cool green forest area with its cool single track is definitely something to look forward to.
So nothing really crazy happened to me along the course I took gels about every 45 min wore my nathan vest with a bottle in the front pouch and iphone in the other pouch with gels to balance it out. I talked and ran with a fellow ultra runner Rudy from Fresno most of the way out and we kept a pretty steady pace getting to the 26 mile turnaround in about 4:11. Once turning around you have to climb back the almost 1200' you just came flying down over 3 miles and I didn't quite fly back up. I started hiking a bit more and Rudy dropped me as he kept running. I still felt pretty good just couldn't change gears that well from descending to ascending but I ran when I could and got back up to the high point of the course.
Coming into mile 40 I was feeling pretty good and started thinking to myself,"ok just 20 more miles and you'll be at mile 60, wait what!?" That's what the hundred miler did to my thought process and at this point it gave me a good laugh and pumped me up knowing I only had 10 more miles to the finish. Just after my good laugh I caught up to a guy that I had been following earlier on the single track and I figured he would be a good person to tag along with since we were about the same speed. I knew at this point I wasn't going to finish under 8 hours but for some reason I couldn't do the math for the last ten miles so I asked the guy, "what time are you expecting to finish in?" His reply, "oh about 9, 9 and 1/2 hrs". I kind of nodded my head then thought to myself, "wait 10 miles left, we're just under 8 hours, what the hell is this guy talking about?" I still didn't do the math but I knew I wasn't going to take over 2 hours to run 10 miles so I made a point of breaking stride with him and pushing my pace a bit. I was feeling really good at this point and started running up most of the climbs and keeping a good pace on the downhills. Then about mile 45ish I caught back up to Rudy, which really pumped me up because I thought he was long gone. It felt great coming into the finish and seeing that I beat my least years time by over an hour with an 8:31:40, definitely a great day overall.