Salomon 4 Trails

So I'm p sure that the rule is that you're not allowed to be proud of good results if you can't face up to the bad ones. Remember when the wheels fell off Jeremy's wagon in Chicago? Well the same just happened to me but I had 2 mountain passes to negotiate in the remaining 11 miles. The 4 trails is a four day stage race in Germany and Austria. You run about 40k per day. This was to be my warm up for the TransAlps in a couple of months but with injury problems over the past 6 weeks and very little running, I decided that I'd just jog the first day of this as a try out. It was still 36k with three serious climbs. The first three miles were great and I led the whole thing and seriously thought I was going to get the top 3 without a problem. I was pushing up the hills, holding back and feeling good. By mile 7 I could barely walk the flats. By mile 14 I had cramps in both legs which hurt so much that I had to keep crouching to stretch them out. It took me 70 minutes to do the next 2 miles and my heart rate was an average of 178. By mile 18 I was throwing up. At the next aid station a doctor looked at me and took my blood pressure (which he said was "unter hundert") and pulled me from the race. How embarrassing. I could blame a lot of things but I'll never really know what went wrong. All I really know is that I got tamed.