Cranmore Hill Climb Race Report

Man, it was a shitty week. The chances of getting my contract renewed at work started to look bleaker and bleaker as the week wore on, culminating in my boss announcing at the staff meeting on Friday, "We have some people who have been with us for a long time that will be leaving us: Claire, who started with us in October and was instrumental in the MMH project..." And that's how I found out I was going to be getting a summer vacation after all. This, right after being informed that the 80+ comp hours that I racked up working 50-60 hour weeks for 3 months over the winter were no good. I was capped at at 37 comp hours, didn't we ever tell you? So it turns out that you're not getting paid for all those vacation days you've already taken after all. Not to mention, the icing on the cake: an innocent comment which provoked a malicious and sarcastic comment from said (incompetent) boss.

Plus there have been the thunder storms. Every day last week it was sunny and beautiful right up until the moment I started leaving the office, when the thunder clouds would roll in just in time for my walk to the train, then the buckets of rain would start falling just as I got off the train. Every. Single. Day. It was like a not-too-subtle movie in that You Suck at Life scene.


But I'm not here to bitch about my other life, I'm here to tell you about how I climbed a mountain. You may notice that this post has a slightly different narrative style to other posts. This is because I'm writing it in a big, fat hurry and not really bothering to try to think of fun stories to tell. I'm sure I'll have lots to talk about when I'm on my forced vacation. For now you get moody, stream-of consciousness writing.

When Gadfly Thom told me about the race series where you ran up ski mountains in New Hamshire including Mt. Monadnock, Loon, Cranmore, and the granddaddy of them all, Mt. Washington, it sounded like fun. That was back when I was running a lot and gas still cost under $3.50/gallon. But then I wasn't selected for the lottery for Mt. Washington, and then I looked at a map. I thought New Hampshire was only about 30 minutes away. Well it turns out that there's more to New Hampshire than just the Massachusetts border. There are parts of New Hampshire that go WAY the fuck up there. When I saw that I was going to have to drive 3 hours to the Presidential Range, the idea of running up a ski mountain lost its novelty. And did I mention I'd had a crappy week at work?

I got a lousy night's sleep, woke up at 3:15 am to be on the road an hour later to get there in time for the 8:00 start. Not only was I wrong about WHERE Mt. Cranmore was, but also WHEN the race was. When I got there there was no one in the parking lot. Know why? Because the race started at 9:00. What an idiot! You would think I would have looked closer at the web site when I almost showed up for this race last week instead of this week.

At about 8:15 I left the lodge and started trying to look busy outside by the starting line. It was a cloudy day, which, in the mountains, means that the clouds are only about 50 feet above your head. At about 8:30 it started raining. It wasn't raining hard, just a few drops. It was the kind of rain that you can pretend isn't there, and it won't really insist on making your clothes wet or anything. Then, at 8:45-ish the thunder started and the skies opened up. The runners who weren't already out warming up huddled under a tent next to the starting line while a river appeared at our feet where there had been dry ground before. People started trading stories about people they knew that had been struck by lightning. Then, at 9:00 a woman with lots of stories about being struck by lightning said, "Oh my god, he's serious!" I looked over towards the starting line and some lunatic with a bullhorn was trying to get people lined up for the race.

I was going to take pictures, but guess what? My camera broke! Had I mentioned that this had been a shitty week?

So as we started scrambling up the hill, it was still pouring and thunder was still rumbling through the mountains. I learned very, very, very quickly that morning how steep a ski mountain really is. For some reason I equated skiing with biking, and since I run up hills that are hard to ride up all the time, I thought that this would be the same. Wrong! The course had us zig-zagging up the mountain, with average grades around 20%, reaching up into the high 30's and 40's, and even hitting 50% at one point. We climbed 1,100 feet in 1.5 miles. And remember, this was a ski mountain, so it was all on trails, no pavement. And in the rain, the mountain had turned into a giant blob of pudding. Everywhere we went you could see footprints 3 feet long and several inches deep from where people had slipped in the mud.

The main trails were grassy areas, but we were mostly running across those (not up), through the glades in between. Actually, I'd take the deep mud and roots over the slippery granite and grass any day. Some of the sections were even runable. Then we came up on the top of a chairlift. I almost said out loud, "That wasn't so bad!" but then we ran around a bend in the trail and saw the course markers going up a steep, steep rout through the trees that almost required you hands AND feet scrambling. And right after that, that's when the course went straight up the black diamond.

If you don't ski and don't know, trails are classified as green circles (beginner), blue squares (intermediate), and black diamonds (expert), mainly based on steepness. This one stayed pretty solidly between 25 and 45% for half a mile the whole rest of the way up (except for the few yards where you had to walk horizontally across the wet, slippery granite which dropped off the edge of the mountain into a cloud). I mean, this would have been very, very steep if it were a set of stairs, and hills are harder than stairs. This was skin-your-nose-on-the-ground-2-steps-in-front-of-you steep. This sucked. I was walking up the hill and STILL my hamstrings were burning so bad I wondered if I would have to stop and take a breather. I wouldn't have been the only one.

Finally, FINALLY I got to the top where there was a photographer waiting to ambush us: soaked, exhausted, covered in mud, in the middle of a thunderstorm, at the highest point for miles. "SMILE!" she called out.

Then we ran down. They were kind enough to put the rout back down on a green circle, which was only about an average of 15% grade the whole way down. The trail looked like a riverbed (I mean a real river, not just one created by a flash flood), so the ground was loose and sandy and covered in large cobble-sized rocks. My feet got so hot from the friction of trying to slow myself the whole way down, that it actually felt GOOD to step in puddles.

I got to the bottom (roughly 5 K) in around 48 minutes: the slowest 5K I have ever run in my life. Then I ran off for the second loop.

On the second loop it had at least stopped raining, which meant I was feeling HOT. My clothes were still soaked, though, and I spent the whole second loop (and most of the first actually) with one hand on my waist trying to keep my pants from falling down under the weight of the water they'd taken on. My split for the second loop was actually nearly even with the first, and I felt better physically, if you can compare shades of agony. I finished in 1:34:29, the 22nd of 33 women. Total elevation gain/loss 2889' in 7.08 miles. "What'd you think?" Thom asked me at the finish.
I gave him a good, long look. "It sucked!" I said.

Then I got lost-ish on th way home and drove like 50 miles out of my way in the middle of bumfuck New Hampshire where there wasn't so much as a gas station to stop at. The only good thing: when I actually found gas it was UNDER $4.00 A GALLON! It was like finding a leprechaun. Only this leprechaun was the kind that doesn't give you any gold, and takes your lucky charms at the end of the rainbow. Without thinking I filled up my tank and overdrew my checking account.

Actually, it wasn't all bad. On the course I could have been heard to make jokes like:
"I hope you guys didn't wear your dress shoes today!" (running through ankle-deep mud in a glade).
"I'm faking!" At the top of the mountain when the photographer commented on how I was already smiling.
"No! I just want to go home!" With another smile, to the guys at the water stop the second time I reached the summit. This got a laugh out of them.
"You know, it's kind of nice, once you're soaked through and your shoes are filthy, there's nothing much you can do, so you might as well just run through the mud puddles." At a particularly muddy patch on the second ascent.

So I guess it wasn't all bad.

Oh, did I mention that I biked 108 miles in under 6 hours the day before? Today my quads are TOAST. So what did I do to fix it? I did exactly what you're NOT supposed to do when your quads are wrecked: I rode some hill repeats.

The end