In a quest to maintain fitness, I signed up for “Run For The Ranch 2024”, a series of three 5K races at Paramount Ranch. Paramount Ranch is now part of the National Park Service, but at one time served as the backlot for Paramount Films and had semi-permanent facades for filming scenes in the old west. Sadly in 2018, most of the buildings burned down in the Woosley fire. The races are a way to raise money for replacing the buildings with updated fire-proof construction. Since the wife and I hike there almost daily, I signed up for all three races.

I wanted to collect my race results in one place for future reference, and I also got a bunch of questions from friends about the race details, so I’ll give you the bottom line first: There was a reason the US Olympic committee didn’t bother sending me to the Paris olympics this week. I’ve never been a particularly fast runner. While staying active is a pretty big priority for me to increase longevity¹, I almost never look too critically at my running times, so after the races I wanted to look in some detail at what my results were.

Here are the results by the numbers

Race date	minutes/mile	Rank in age group
July 11, 2024	8:38	3rd
July 18, 2024	8:31	2nd
July 25, 2024	8:40	3rd

The runner who placed first on the July 11 and 25 races failed to show up for the July 18 race, which is why I placed second. So I think the moral of the story is: If I want to win races, I need to focus harder on eliminating the competitation before they appear at the starting line.

I’ll also note that temperatures were in the mid-to-high 80s for all three races. Running in 80 degree temps sounds terrible until you think about the people running the Badwater 135 ultramarathon, which occurred earlier a few days ago. The typical starting temperature is 115 degrees, proving the running adage: No matter how bad it seems, somebody else always has it worse.

Here are a few other items I wanted to collect in one place.

• The two 60 year olds faster than me were in the 7:30 min/mile range. Some old guys can still rock.
• There is a 100 ft hill right in the middle of the race, which practically killed me. Hill profile in the pics below.
• Apple fitness stats:
  • VO2Max: 51.3
  • Max HR: 166
  • Resting HR: 43
  • HR variability: 43ms

Lastly, some pics to help me remember the pain:

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1. I’m not so interested in adding years to the end of my life, so much as I’m interested in adding years in the middle. ↩