Gear Review: La Sportiva Skylite

Going into the Heartland 100 I was still on-the-fence about which shoe to wear. I knew that the race course was all gravel roads, covering wide range in quality, gravel size etc… I almost went with a pure road shoe but after getting a bit more course beta from race veterans I decided to go with my fairly new pair of La Sportiva Skylites.

The Dizzy Donut Challenge; a race within a race

When I first learned about the Krispy Kreme Challenge and that an inaugural running of this event in Huntsville was going to be taking place in late November I was fairly excited.  The “Challenge” is very straight forward: Run two miles to Krispy Kreme, eat a dozen glazed donuts, run two miles back to the finish; all in less than an hour.    The Challenge originally started in Raleigh, North Carolina to benefit NC Children’s Hospital; in Huntsville the Challenge benefits the United Cerebral Palsy foundation.  In 2004 the Raleigh event hosted only 12 participants; last year had over 5500 runners!   

Unfortunately it turned out that the Dizzy Fifties 50km  was to be held on the same morning as the Challenge!  So for a short moment I thought that I wouldn’t be able to do the Krispy Kreme Challenge but then I got to looking at the possibility of running both events somehow.  As fate would have it, the Dizzy Fifties was to start at 6:30 a.m. (to maximize the amount of available sunlight this late in the year) and the Challenge to start at 8:00 a.m.  As the Dizzy Fifties 50km course consists of a short 2.3 mile “Little Loop”, followed by three repeats of the North (4 miles) and South (5.59 miles) Loops there was opportunity to run some of the early sections of the course and then go do the Challenge and then return and finish up what was left.  

So, the “Dizzy Donut Challenge” was set: run the first 6.3 miles of the Dizzy Fifties 50km course, jump in a car and drive to the start of the Krispy Kreme Challenge, complete the Challenge and then drive back to the Dizzy Fifties race site and finish up our remaining mileage for a total of 35 miles.