It's been a long, long, long absence for me from the FFA boards in general, and this thread in particular. While I checked in occasionally I had been hoping to become a bit more active in this thread over the past year as I trained for my first 50 miler, but ultimately just didn't make the time for it. Big thanks to everyone for a lot of the wisdom I've gained from this thread. The wisdom, general encouragement of each other, and humor aided tremendously in scratching my ultramarathon itch.
As noted above, I consumed only Tailwind (one bottle per hour w/ 200 calories) and Huma gel (one per ~1 hour) with no solid food the entire race and never once felt low on energy or had any stomach issues. Can't say enough about those two products from my personal experience. I had some IT band issues from miles 45-52, which was the first time I had ever dealt with that. That said, my goal was to simply finish and based on finishes %'s from my first 50K in the spring and trail marathon mid-summer, I had planned on a 13-14 hour finish for this 52.1 mile race. I managed to go sub-12 hours which I was more than pleased with, including a surprising kick to knock out the last mile in 7:41 to get there. The race I did was run concurrently with a marathon and 100 miler (started the day prior), and it was an eye opener seeing some of those 100 milers continue to put one foot in front of the other on the trail, often times in a zombie-like fashion. Not sure why that didn't strike the thought of one day toeing the line of a 100 miler from my head, but it didn't.