You're Doomed!

I ran the Fells race at the end of March this year. It was one of my slowest 50Ks ever. You're doomed!

~Words of encouragement from Damon, accomplished ultrarunner and my own long-distance running guru.

Nevertheless, I can't say I didn't know what I was getting myself into. The Fells is a state park reserve that starts about half a mile from my house. I could be at a trailhead for the very trail that we ran today in less than a mile. I know these woods like the back of my hand, or at least pretty well. Although I don't usually run on the Skyline Trail (I usually run the shorter, flatter, and less technical Reservoir Trail), I have run it before. Let me tell you one thing about this trail: it is pretty much impossible to overstate its difficulty. The whole, entire thing is covered with rocks, roots and all kinds of perils to ankles and those with poor balance in general. The hills are not long, but they are steep, they are everywhere, and they are often un-runable both on the way up and the way down. There are spots where you're climbing down 10-foot rock faces, or balancing on the spine of a smooth, rounded glacial boulder. Although it is well marked with painted arrows and blazes, it is still very easy to get lost. I have never been able to run more than about 10 or 12 miles in these woods without completely frying myself. It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not: these are the most technical trails I've ever run on (not that I'm an expert).

And yet, I signed up for the "ultra" division, mostly because of how flexible it was. You could run 24, 32, or 40 miles; whatever you felt like. And anyway, this race had the greatest web site I'd ever seen. I just had to sign up and do it up right.

Bonus points for funny captions for this photo: What thoughts are going through my head at this moment?
I showed up at the top-secret starting location (classified information to keep too many cars from showing up for the limited parking at the trail head). The other racers were a mix of ultrarunners and adventure racer types. You could tell by their hydration systems what group everyone belonged to: ultrarunners had hand-helds and belts, adventure racers had camelbaks. Everyone was decked out in their Sunday race best from Eastern Mountain Sports, and I was a little self-conscious in my hodge-podge of $11 Red Sox beanie, thermal bike jersey (for the pockets), rash guard (ssssshhhhhhh, it's meant for surfers to wear under their wetsuits, but my mom bought it for me thinking it was a long-sleeved running shirt, and it actually WORKS well as a long-sleeved running shirt), and running tights that I had put on soaking wet right out of the washer this morning. The only thing I'd done right were my ugly-as-sin the trail shoes.

Because days are so short this time of year, the race director was letting people leave early if they so desired. A couple of people requested to leave at around 7:30, and Bogie (the race director) held a tiny, little cone-shaped device right in their faces and pushed a button. An air siren went off right next to their ears. "What the hell was that?!" one of them asked.
"It was my bike horn!" Bogie said with a giant grin. "We're professionals here! We do it right!" So the two racers went ahead and started running.

I got together with a group that planned to leave at about 7:50, but one of them got in line for the bathroom, and I didn't get the memo. There was a bit of confusion about who was leaving when, and because I didn't get the memo, he wrote 7:50 next to only my name. "Are you going to leave with your coffee?" he asked.
"Well, no. I was going to ask if you had a trash..." I said, feeling like a fool. Where was everybody? Why was I all by myself?
"Are you leaving or not?" he asked.
"Ummmm, I was going to wait for them..." Time was ticking away, 7:50 had already come and gone.
"Well it's you're time," he shrugged. "You're written down as having left at 7:50 whether you're here or not..." Then he blew the air horn in my face. I didn't know what to do, so I stepped one step past the gate to stop cars from driving on the trail, the "starting line." Now that I was on the course, I stood there waiting some more. Finally it became clear that someone was breaking Claire's Number 1 Rule of Public Pooping: Don't, so I decided not to wait any longer and left all by myself.

Loop 1

Weather (usually cruel, wet, and cold), elevation, length, not paying attention and getting lost will make this a painful DNF for many ... many ... many MANY racers.
~From the Release of Liability on the event's web site.

I love running on these trails. Since you simply can't go fast on the rough terrain, I have oodles of fun hopping from rock to rock, swishing back and forth on switchbacks. I feel like a video game character. The series of bridges at the right I call the Super Mario Bridges because, well, that's who they make me feel like. If I stand on them for too long they'll sink into the quicksand and I'll go flying into the air shrugging and the player and kicking my little feet. All of the leaves were off the trees now, and all over the ground, which sometimes made it slippery or hard to see the roots and rocks, but they were all covered with that kind of delicate frost that looks fake. It was pretty. Even though I was alone, I was really enjoying myself. The sun was really bright, and sometimes it was hard to see the blazes on the trees, or distinguish white paint from frozen puddles, but I was finding my way okay. Or, anyway I was until I wasn't. I had been running on a section where the trail followed my usual rount, but suddenly all the white trail markers had disappeared. I walked back a few hundred yards, on the trail to where I'd seen the last white blaze, then turned around, and... there were no more. I went back and forth for several minutes before I finally saw a rock sitting under a bush with a white stripe painted on it. This was the trail?!

That's when things started getting hairy. The ascents were steep, steep, steep, and the descents were more about not pitching forward and breaking your neck than running. My GPS registered me as standing still more on the descents than the ascents. Really, the second half was more like hiking than anything else. I'd been overtaken by some of the group that I'd tried to wait for at the start, and I was having a heck of a time keeping up with them. They were adventure racers, and this was the only reason I could think of that they were not following the Number 1 Rule of Ultra Trail Running (as designated by me): Walk the Uphills. I would have let them go, but I was afraid that I might miss the turnoff to go back to the start/finish area and sign in as having finished the loop. I needn't have feared, though, because it was very clearly marked with arrows spraypainted on the ground, and laminated printouts stuck to signposts in case you were too dumb to understand "TO START -->" on the ground.

Alright, I have to admit it, I'm a bit thick. Runners were responsible for putting down the time they finished each loop. Was that the time of day? The cumulative time since the start? Time taken per loop? Not to mention, since my Garmin doesn't actually tell time, and was set to autopause when I was stopped, I didn't have any of this information. So I just wrote down the same time as the guy in front of me: an hour and thirty-eight minutes. It was probably totally wrong, since I and I alone had left at 7:50, but whatever.

Loop 2
You can break your neck or your spine and be paralyzed. -- You can fell [sic], get wounded and bleed to death. -- You can lose one or both eyes, become paralyzed or disabled. -- You can get dehydrated if you do not drink water and electrolyte drinks.
~From the release of liability.

I was still feeling fresh. Actually, I was pretty surprised. I haven't done much trail running since I decided this summer that training for a 50-mile race was a stupid idea, so in theory all my little stabilizing muscles should have been out of shape, right? The connective tissue in my ankles should have been weak and ready to snap every time I rolled off a rock. The hills should have been kicking my ass. Instead I felt fresh. As much as I hate to admit it, the few times I've gone trail racing since I started weight training have been much, much easier. So there is some truth to what Angry and Rocketpants say about strength training being good for endurance sports, but don't tell them I said so. My running volume has also nearly doubled in the last few months, so it could be that too...

Coming out of the aid station I fell in with the adventure racers again. There were only two of them, a man and a woman. The woman, whose name was (I think) Jen, had been the race director of the "Run Like a Girl" trail race. It was a race that I'd almost gone to, and I don't remember why I didn't. But in the parking lot before the race Jen had given me a t-shirt that had been left over from the race and asked me to wear it. I'm a total t-shirt whore, and I think that being given a t-shirt by the race director exempts me from the Number 1 Rule of Race T-Shirt Etiquette: Thou Shalt Not Wear the T-shirt from a Race that Thou Hadst Not Finished. Anyway, I feel that I should at least give her a plug here.

I managed to keep up with Jen and her adventure racer companion for a few miles where we exchanged the usual information: where are you from, what races do you do, have you ever tried... etc. Then I told them that if I tried to keep up with them any longer I'd be in trouble later on. That was the last time I would have company on the trail.

There was a spot about a third of the way around where Bogie had set out jugs of water. I eyed them as I passed, but my water bottle was still 2/3 of the way full, and I'd only drank about 2/3 of a bottle on the first loop. I decided not to stop and ran on. Big mistake. I was moving slower this time, being slightly more careful with my footing and in general I didn't have the same spring in my step when I got to the really tough terrain in the second half. The temperature was above freezing now, and although I was still cool I have a rare talent that I can sweat buckets even when I'm freezing. I'd run out of water when I still had a few slow miles left to travel before getting back to the car, and I was getting thirsty. I sucked desperately on my water bottle and all I was able to pull out was air. By the time I got back to the start/finish area I was parched.


I had found Jen's Adventure Racing Buddy's number lying on the trail, and had carried it some three miles back to the start, planning to pin it on the sign-in sheet for him, but when I got to the parking lot he was standing right there. I called out his name (it was written on the number), and handed it to him. He, Jen, and another adventure racer (I could tell by her camelbak) were standing around looking worried. "Is everything okay?" I asked.
"Did you see a girl out there? She's young... She must have missed the finish," the third adventure racer said. "She was wearing a blue jacket."
I thought really hard, I thought I did remember a little girl that matched that description. She had been about 8 years old. "Is she blond?" The woman nodded. "I think I do remember seeing her..." I said, "... but I can't remember where. I'm so sorry."

"Well if you do see her, her name is Tori. Can you please tell her how to get back to the start?" My god, I was thinking, how is an 8-year-old going to follow blazes if experienced trail runners are having trouble spotting them??? And who lets an 8-year-old run a race alone in the woods??? "It's her first race too..." the woman lamented as an afterthought. No shit! I thought.

I drank all the water I could swallow, ate some snacks, and signed in. Again, I didn't know what time to write on the sign-in sheet. My garmin said I'd taking about 3 hours and 30 minutes to get this far, so I added 5 minutes for good measure and hit the trail again. I vowed that even though I hate children, if I found Tori at any point on the trail, I would take the shortest rout back to the cars with her. When I did eventually find Tori, 90% of the way through my third loop, she had been found by the third adventure racer. "We found her!" she said relieved. I looked at the girl, she was blond, wearing a blue jacket, and young, but she was about 16 years old, not eight. I was relieved on so many levels.

Loop 3

Also you are aware that if you drop out you have to have enough cash with you to be able to call a cab.
-From the Release of Liability

I was feeling absolutely... fine! I know you won't believe it, I didn't either. Sure, I was moving at a snail's pace and being ever more cautious with my footing, but when it came time to run again it didn't take superhuman will power to overcome inertia and start running like usually happens in the later stages of an endurance event, especially a tough one like this. Normally, after about 8 or 10 miles on these trails I'm tripping over rocks and almost falling ass over teakettle, letting out ugly yelps and grunts every 5 minutes. I'd run over 16 miles so far on a trail that I'd never dared to run more than once in a day and I had only tripped or slipped bad enough to make an embarrassing noise once or twice. What the hell was going on here?!

I had a theory that it might have something to do with the Advil I'd taken before the race. I never take ibuprofin before a race or important workout because it thins your blood, lowering your hematocrit (red blood cell density in your blood), and impairs oxygen delivery. But this morning I anticipated having "womanly problems," and figured it would be a good idea to stay away from my VO2 Max on a long day like today anyway, so I'd popped a couple of Advil. I can stand the pain of running 31 miles straight, but I will NOT stand the pain of non-athletic cramps. Could the Advil really be the reason I was feeling so great? Was it the weight training? Was it the fact that I've been running 5 days a week? It certainly wasn't the easiness of the course!

Time wore on, and other than the occasional dog walker, hiker, or racer coming in the other direction, I saw nobody. I had my iPod in my pocket, but I didn't really feel the need to listen to it, even though "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" was stuck in my head, having replaced Adam Sandler's "Hanukkah Song" which was stuck in my head on the last loop. When I wasn't trying to remember what came between the line "Eeeeeverywhere you gooooo..." and "But the prettiest sight you'll seeeeeee, is the Christmas wreath that will beeeeeee, on your ooooown frooooont dooooooor!" (or was it Christmas tree instead of wreath ? Why would you have a Christmas tree on your door? Maybe it was beside...), I was scanning my body to see what hurt: nothing. My muscles, joints, and EVERYTHING felt fine. I'd told myself that I could drop out after 3 laps, or 24 miles, if the course was too hard. But it wasn't too hard.

Still, that last 8 miles would take an awfully long time. The sun was getting low, and I'd flipped my sunglasses on top of my head. It felt like it was getting late. I didn't know it, but it still wasn't 1:00. I felt great now, but how would I feel after another 8 miles? Would I still be able to negotiate the tough trail if I started to get tired? What if I fell and sprained my ankle, or worse? What was I trying to prove? I KNEW beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could finish the 32 miles, I just didn't know if I should. If I slogged through 32 miles, it would probably mean digging really deep into my reserves. My workouts would probably be really crappy for a really long time if I went for that full loop, and I was really enjoying getting faster for once.

Left: My feet leaving the ground, even on the uphills, despite being half way through my third loop.

...But still... It WOULD be nice to get in 1 more marathon before 2008 is out... As long as I was running 24 miles and feeling good, I might as well make it a marathon. Better to finish 26 miles feeling good, than finish 32 feeling like crap. So I decided that when I finished the third loop I'd write my finishing time on the sign-in sheet, indicate that I was done, and run a final 2.2 miles unofficially. There was a spot about a mile from the start/finish area where the trail hit a road, and that road was about a mile from my house, all down hill. I figured that I could just run home, and then get a ride back to my car.

Above: My butt looking big, but I SWEAR it was just my stocked pockets!; Below: My butt, this time way more butt and way less stuff in the pockets. Notice: These are the pee pants (the ones that show pee stains well), and there are no dark spots in my crotch!

I'd run out of food (gumdrops, orange slices, and crystalized ginger) about half way through the third loop, and I was hungry when I got in to the start/finish area. But still, I wasn't bonking. I felt fresh, just sick of running this stupid, cruel trail all by myself. Maybe it was that, for the first time ever, since there were no aid stations, I'd been drinking accelerade the whole time rather than re-filling with Gatorade? Was that why I felt so good?

Left: No caption contest here, I remember exactly what I was thinking – You're going to take my picture NOW?! On an uphill at the end of my third lap?!?!?!

On the sign-in sheet Bogie had written in huge letters "I MEANT THE TIME OF DAY!!!" So I pulled out my cell phone (which I'd carried with me since the web site had warned me that I'd need to call my own cab if I needed to drop out), and checked the time. 1:30 on the nose. I had covered 24 miles in an incredible 5 hours and 40 minutes! I wrote "1:30 PM --- DONE! THANK YOU" next to my name, then I grabbed some cookies and another bag of candy from my car and set out for my bonus mileage.

The above image is what you get when you follow the "Results" link on the web page. If you look closely you'll see that there's no Claire, but there's a Blair Badass Mofo.

Loop 4
There are about 2 possible shortcuts -- people caught off the white Skyline trail ( on shortcuts) will be posted on this website ( in disgrace , of course :-)
~ From the Course Description on the race web site

Suddenly running home seemed like a stupid idea. Running on pavement would probably make my poor legs hurt more than the last 24 miles of running had, and what if no one was home to give me a ride? What if I was locked out? I could just run out along the trail for 1.1 miles, then turn around and come back. Or better yet, I could take the flatter Reservoir Trail out for 1.1 miles and then turn back. But I decided that I'd started on the Skyline Trail, and I should finish on the Skyline trail, even if I wasn't really finishing.

The problem was that my Garmin hadn't registered exactly 24 miles at the end of the last loop, it was more like 23.5, and I must have been more loopy than I thought, because I was having a really tough time figuring it out in my head. At first I thought I needed to run 1.7 miles each way, which worked out to be... what? Turn around at 25.1 miles. Yeah, that's it. But then a few minutes later I wasn't sure again. Wait... 2.7 miles; divided by two; plus 23.5 is.... 25 miles? Yeah! That must be right! Something still seemed fishy, but I figured that if I ran 26.21 miles or more, then I could technically call it an "ultramarathon" if I really wanted to split hairs. Right?

I ran an interminable 1.5 miles out, and an even longer 1.5 miles back, and arrived at the "finish line" without a soul in sight after completing 26.54 miles in 6:01:34 (that doesn't count all the time I was stopped, or when I was moving so slowly that Garmin THOUGHT I had stopped). In just over 7 months I had finished 6 events of Marathon distance or longer (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). Why so many? That's twice as many marathons in 31 weeks as Bobby's done in his entire life. Because naked marathons terrify me, and the idea of a marathon at the end of an ironman makes my blood run cold. That's why. This year I wanted to do as many marathons as possible so that I wouldn't be so scared of them anymore. I wanted to be absolutely, positively sure that I could finish a marathon under any circumstances, trained or not, rested or not, part of a longer event or not. Marathons in ironmans still scare the shit out of me, but naked marathons now seem a bit more manageable.

The Finish
Bad things can also happen when you train for this race, when you drive towards this race or after you leave the race. So you know that trail or mountain running is not safe.
~ From the Release of Liability

I spotted several boxes of pizza sitting behind Bogie's car and had shoved have a piece in my face in one big mouthful when a couple emerged from their car to grab more pizza themselves. "How'd you do?" the woman asked.
"I'm done," I said. That was all that mattered.
"Yeah, I finished 3 loops, and that was enough for me," she said. She gestured towards her husband, "I cheated. He ran with me the whole last lap. About a mile from the end I started crying and saying I couldn't do it anymore."
"That's okay," I said. "It makes a much better story that way."
"Yeah, well if I did it again, I'd only sign up for the 8-miler," she said.
"If I did it again, I'd cheat," I told her.

When they left, another man I'd seen running in the other direction several times during the day came in. He was also calling it a day after only 3 loops. I'd noticed that most of the people had written "DONE" after their 3rd loop time on the sign-in sheet. "I just wasn't expecting it to be so hard!" he said. "I've only seen one other trail this technical, and that's at Wapack. There wasn't a flat section on that whole course!" I confused Wapack with Wasatch, which is a 100-mile race in the Rockies. "Yeah, I've done Wasatch once too," he said. It made me feel better to know that he was an accomplished trail runner and still thought that this terrain was difficult.
I gestured to the dirt stains that went down the whole front of his shirt, "You take a spill?"
"Just a couple," he smiled, meaning it had been more than a couple.
"And you're wearing those shorts so you can show off that sexy scab on your shin?" I joked. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for not falling.

By this point I'd shoved 3 pieces of pizza in my face and I was beginning to shiver. I went over to my car and drove the 3 miles home, during which time I: waited for a stop sign to change, made a turn when I should have yielded and cut a guy off, and swerved all over the road. I guess I was more out of it than I thought. I wasn't doing the post-marathon shuffle, though. When I got home I went to the bathroom, and my pee was ORANGE. Guess I should have had a bit more to drink.

So, kids, the lesson is: Don't drink and drive, but don't NOT drink and drive either.

Side note that has nothing to do with this post, but I have to share anyway: It's a sad, sad day when you start getting hand-me-downs from your cousin's 11-year-old daughter... and they fit.

Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!

After last week's terrible disappointment/failure, I've done some major soul-searching. I dug around deep in there and I couldn't find a single reason to press on with my goal of running a 50 miler in November, other than that it had been on the schedule for almost a year. How did it get on the damned schedule in the first place? I was looking on Cool Running one day, the day after my untrained marathon run on nothing but piss and vinegar, and I thought I was capable of anything. That day I saw the listing for a trail marathon the next week, gave about 2 seconds' thought to signing up at that very moment, and then decided not to press my luck. I decided that rather than running the marathon in 2007, I'd run the 50 miler in 2008. Not very dramatic. It was a whim, and I'm stubborn, and this is how I get myself into trouble. Now, for the second year in a row, I've made the adult decision to leave the 50 milers to the REAL runners.

Running is stupid. Ultrarunning is stupider.

This year I feel like I've proven a lot of things to myself and to other people. I'm pretty sure that if you're reading this, no matter what your opinion of me, you probably don't think I'm a softie. Even admitting that other people might not think I'm a loser is a big step for me personally this year. Tick off another reason that I don't have to run 50 miles.

BUT me taking the mature, adult approach to things ended there.

If I was going to give up on a goal that I had broadcast to the world, then the very least I could do to not look like a total loser would be not to have my first and only step towards said goal be a DNF. So what did I do? I got right on the internet and found the web page for my next scheduled race: a 50K near Syracuse, NY.

But registration had closed.

I breathed a sigh of relief, and then I got mad at myself for giving up so easily. I clicked on the "Contact Us" button and wrote to the race director begging him to let me in. Of course I thought he would say no and that I would be off the hook. I forgot that trail runners are the nicest people in the world.

"Claire, call me immediately. I think we can work something out." Oh fuck.

Here are all the reasons why this was a bad idea:
~Syracuse is over 5 hours away.
~I didn't have a place to stay.
~I did an ironman 3 weeks ago, and I was pretty sure that a 50K was on the list of things you're NOT supposed to do while you're recovering.
~I really didn't want to run this race.

But a 5-minute phone call later, Todd, the world's nicest race director had opened registration back up for me, and I was signed up for the Green Lakes 50K in Fayetteville, NY.

I took a Tylenol PM at midday Saturday and went back to bed at about 3:00. At 10:45 I woke up, packed up my stuff, and hit the road at midnight. God, this was a stupid idea. Every car I passed I thought, "Are you going to be the drunkard that kills me?" It seems that in a stupid decision like this, Fate should intervene to let you know that you're on the wrong track. But I made it to Fayetteville with no problems at about 5:30 in the morning.

This was the only trail event that I had ever done that was chip timed. A group of trail runners always looks a lot like a bunch of hobos fresh out of the Salvation Army, so I couldn't really tell if it was a very competitive field, but the chip on my ankle didn't bode well. I wondered if I would finish in last place (which would be okay) and have to be alone for the next 31 miles (which would not be okay). Luckily a woman named Rosemary, who was a nervous chatterer struck up a conversation. She said that this was her first ultra (and first marathon for that matter), and that she'd read all the blogs and race reports about this race, and she was just so excited to be running. I made 2 mental notes: 1. Only say nice things about other runners, because they are all nice people, and they all use the same internet that I do (right, Damon?), and 2. I was probably the only person in this crowd that really, truly didn't want to be here, so out of respect I should fake like I was happy to be out here half way to fucking Cleveland running 31 miles in the woods.

The course was 4 7.7-mile loops, each of which was broken into 2 sub-loops: the Green Lakes loop (which was flat) comprising the first and last 2 miles, and the Serengeti loop (which was hilly) making up the middle 4 miles. The course was absolutely stunning. Really. I'm not one to be taken by scenery, but by the end of the first loop, I was glad I had made the phone call and the drive. The Green Lakes are actually green, not because of pond scum, but because of some sort of chemistry or fairies. Or chemistry fairies. The water was crystal clear. (It really looks like the picture below). On the Serengeti loop you ran up a hill and then through grassy fields. One was filled with purple flowers, another with yellow flowers (not actually the pictures above, but my stupid camera phone couldn't handle the colors). At one point about half way through the loop you run around a corner and can see the whole countryside laid out below you.


I was surprised that most of the people around me had a slight Midwestern twang in their accents. I'd only driven 5 hours due west, was the Midwest really this close to home? I talked to a couple from Michigan after the finish whose drive had only been about an hour longer than mine, and they'd come through Canada to get here. "Michigan, I've never been to Michigan," I said. "That sounds so exotic!" And then, "Canada, that REALLY sounds exotic." I was serious about Canada, I lied about Michigan. It's hard to say something nice about Michigan without lying.

By the end of the first loop, it was pretty obvious that it was going to be a hot one. The humidity in the air was brutal even before it got hot. It was a sunny day, and nearly the entire Serengeti loop was exposed. The high temperatures of the day were pushing 90*, and that was the main complaint of everyone I talked to. Goddamn, it was hot! It was the kind of heat where your sweat just can't evaporate. Blech. But I've been getting used to the heat, I guess. Not so much that my body's been acclimating, but that I've finally realized that there's nothing that my complaining is going to do about the situation, so it's best not to dwell on it.

I spoke with a few women on the run: Rosemary (from the start), whose longest run up until this point was a 25K; Brooke, who was only 18, running with her mom, and starting college tomorrow (she made me feel old because I talked to her like someone more grown up than she was, and she let me); the woman in the grey sports bra with the Midwestern accent whose name I never caught; and Susan, who I was only with briefly at the end. But mostly I talked to my usual demographic: straight men over 40. My first 2 laps I was in an endless leap-frog game with a man in red shorts (Mark, I later found out). My second loop I picked up Ray, and ran 3/4 of the second half of the race with him.

Having Ray around really helped the time go by. What sucked about the 4-loop course was the fact that by the fourth loop, you know the whole entire course (except that they kept moving the aid stations farther and farther apart). And the real kicker is that when you start the fourth loop you're already at about mile 23 and ready to call it a day. Ray was a chatty, upbeat guy, and the perfect person to keep around on the last loop. He stayed with me to make sure that he went slow enough (I'm good for that!). This was his first 50K, so he didn't want to go too hard, but when I wanted to pick up the pace, he was right there with me. Talking to him made the miles go faster.

I wish this picture had come out. You should have seen the course first thing in the morning.

At the beginning of the second loop a clump of us were running together and a younger guy ran through us repeating, "Look out, 100K winner coming through!". Then an old guy came through right on his heels. The 100K runners had only started 30 minutes before us, so this guy couldn't have been on more than his third loop (of eight). Wasn't it a bit early to be calling the winner? And having a pacer in a low-key race like this? That's obnoxious. He never lapped me again. I was unimpressed.

But the cool thing about this race was that we DID get to see the winners running on their last lap. When you're as slow as I am, you don't get to see much of the action. The first guy lapped us early in our third (his final) loop, and actually APOLOGIZED for lapping us. Clearly, he was way more gracious than Mr. 100K Champion, and had an endearing, high-pitched laugh. We passed him back a few miles later. He was walking and blowing up pretty hard. But still, I get to say that I passed the race leader (okay, a lap behind him, but the fact remains that for a few moments in time I was moving faster than he was). When he started running again and passed us back I called after him, "Now don't let me see you on this trail again!" I hoped he won.
A couple more guys lapped us, and coming out of the far aid station the volunteers yelled after one of them, "He's bonking pretty bad. You can catch him, no problem!"
Oh no! We passed him again about a mile later. He was walking and shaking his muscles out as best he could. It was pretty clear he was going to walk it in the rest of the way. "Are you alright?" I asked. Had this been a road race I would have been met with a snarl if the likes of me passed the likes of him and acted concerned. Instead, he let out that easygoing high-pitched laugh again. "Do you want some gumdrops or something?" I asked. It was the best I could offer. I'd gone for the cheap nutrition option in this race.
"Nah, I'll get there," he said. "Just not as fast as I thought."

When I got to the finish line a few hours later he was there, talking to the other fast guys. "Hey! You made it! Congratulations!" I said.
He gave me a gigantic smile. "You were great out there!" he said, for all the cool kids to hear. "What did you offer me? Gum drops?!" And then he let out that great laugh again. I'm telling you, I could not have received a bigger compliment than to be talked to as an equal by the cool kids. But that was later, at this point he was still falling apart at mile 27, and I was still feeling sorry for myself a full loop behind him at mile 20.

On the second loop my socks had started to slip into my shoes and by now I'd worn holes in the backs of my ankles. At the end of each loop I sat down to re-adjust the socks, but they were really stinging badly. Of course there was the fatigue too, and that stabbing pain in my ass that everyone seems to think is sciatica. With Ray there, though, I seemed to be doing okay. We talked about old war stories, and I told him about Chrissy, and Anne (who I'll tell you guys about soon), Cunt on a pink bike, and Grandpa. "You tell these stories about wanting to trip people and then kick dirt in their face," Ray said to me, "but you seem like such a sweet, angelic little thing."
"Angelic?!" I said. "I don't think anyone who knows me would describe me as SWEET, but thanks."


We came up the hill and there was a group of people there to cheer us on. "I'm finishing this lap, and then I'm never running another step in my life!" I said.
"Aw, you'll be out here again next week!" one of the guys said. They always think they know fucking everything, don't they? What are they? Psychics? What if I never DO run again, huh? Why do they think that NOW is the time to remind me that I will ever have to run again?
"Never again!" I said.
"You'll be back!" a woman said.
"Screw you!" I called over my shoulder. I said it with a big smile and they all laughed.
"See? You can get away with saying things like that," Ray said. "It's that angelic little face of yours."
"Believe me, angelic or not, I don't always get away with it," I said.

The truth was that I knew that I was never, ever going to have to do this again for as long as I lived if I didn't want to, and that made it bearable. If I had known that this was all a step towards another, longer race then I would have hated every second of it. But as it was, I was... surprisingly... in my happy place. Okay, maybe not my happy place, but I didn't wish I was dead. That was huge.

Ray and I passed the marathon mark in just over 5 hours on the clock, which was about 4:45 of real running time. I was aware that this was only a couple of minutes off my old marathon PR. God, I really HAD come a long way since Cape Cod 10 months ago. Right around then Ray started flagging, right when I got my second wind that would take me to the finish. We had picked up Susan at that point, so I didn't feel so bad pulling ahead on a slight uphill when they decided to walk.

Okay, now here's the crazy part: every single person that I'd talked to along the course had ultimately wound up behind me: Rosemary, Mark, Brooke, Susan, Ray, the woman with the Midwestern accent... Even the fast guy with the easy laugh had wound up falling back in a sense. That NEVER happens, I am always the one that is left behind. I've come to expect it. When I passed Brooke's mom in the final 5K (she had been ahead of me the whole race), I couldn't believe it. I was finishing strong! I knew I had a slight chance of breaking 6 hours. It wouldn't be a PR by much, only 3 and a half minutes faster than the last time, but it was something to shoot for.

At Pineland Farms 50K I'd been paced every step of the way by Jay. Now it felt pretty significant that I was doing this on my own. I was going to have to average sub-10-minute miles for the last 5K to break 6 hours, so I dug deep. My body wasn't really cooperating, but I thought about how running a 9:50 mile now was a hell of a lot better than running 7-minute miles behind Michelle as I peed my pants. So I sucked it up and ran hard.

In the last mile (which was flat), I tried to push the pace even more, and was surprised to find that it hurt to breathe. Was I... out of breath? Was I running hard enough to ACTUALLY be pushing my threshold?! I looked at my wrist, I was only running in the high 9's. My body and lungs were just SO tired, that keeping me at below a 10-minute pace right now was as hard as running 2 minutes faster under normal circumstances. Then again, it kind of hurt all over, so it was hard to tell. I wanted to let up so badly, but I also just wanted to be DONE.

The expression "gone-burger" popped into my head. That's how I felt. I don't even know where I heard it, but there it was bouncing around in my mind as I waddled up the final rise to the finish as fast as I could in 6:01:03 (sprinting at 9:05 pace). One minute and three seconds. Oh well.

I tended to some immediate needs: water, pretzels, taking my shoes off, and then I limped down to the beach to sit in the water for a few minutes before I showered. When I got back, fully dressed but not moving any faster, I got a gigantic plate of pasta and set about eating whatever the hell I wanted. When I went up for my second plate, Mark (the man in the red shorts from my first two laps), who was done by now, called me a pig. Whatever, dude. Today I could eat whatever the fuck I wanted.

As I got up to go and thank all the volunteers a man walked up to me. "Are you one of the women that didn't get her prize?" he asked.
"What? I got my finisher's patch," I said. This is a running race. Claires don't win prizes at running races. Claires don't even bother to check the results.
"What's your name?"
"Claire Badas..."
"Claire?! From Boston?!" This was Todd, the race director who had been so patient with me!
I gave him a hug. He looked so happy to see me, that it seemed like the appropriate reaction. "Thank you so much for bending the rules for me..."
He cut me off and put his finger to his lips. "Ssssshhhhhh!"
"Okay, well thank you for all you've done. This really has been such an enjoyable... no, that's not the word... This has been such a positive experience!"
He looked down at his clipboard. "You got second in your category!" he said.
"WHAT?!?!?! Where were the other women?! Did they die?!?!?!" Like I said, Claires don't win running races.
"Don't say that," another volunteer said. "We already found one guy on the ground today." I wonder what the story was with that.
"Is this one of those things where there were only 2 people in my division?" I asked.
Nope. I was the second of 5 women under 35, and 4th of 14 women overall. True, it wasn't a very deep field, but I repeat, Claires don't win running races. Okay, I didn't win, but I placed. Claires don't place in running races.

I won a backpack!

Todd, the world's kindest race director congratulated me, and even printed up google directions for me to get back to the highway. You might think that this story is leading to the conclusion that I'm going to keep going with this ultrarunning business. Nope. I had a really great day, everything seemed to go right, and I felt like it was enough to make up for my DNF. I'd pushed hard, I'd gone long, I'd even done well in the overall standings. And this was exactly the high note I wanted to leave off on. I won't say I'm never running longer than 26.2 miles again. I'm just saying that there'll be plenty of time for that when I'm old and slow and suck at EVERYTHING as much as I suck at running. For now, I'm going to pursue the stuff that I like.

The traffic sucked on the way home, which sucked my whole good mood. What was a 5-hour drive on the way out turned out to be a 7-hour drive on the way back and my legs totally cramped up. Today I am one hurt unit. I'll have more to say about accomplishment soon, I think. But for today, I'm TRYING to keep it short.

D.N.F means Did. Not. Finish

(Note: if you see a big, grey box in the middle of this post, I don't know how to get rid of it. Try opening this page with a different browser.)
Until today, I had never dropped out of a race. Once I had not made a cutoff, and I had several Did Not Starts to my credit, but I had never quit in a race. Until today. But let's start at the beginning.

It all begins on my couch where I have spent every free minute of the past 9 days. I come home from my new job which I loathe every day, plop down on the couch, and turn on the Olympics. When something lame like volleyball is on, I watch the events that I TeVoed. When mom finally goes to bed, I turn out the lights and go to sleep on the couch, because my insomnia has been so bad lately that I haven't been able to sleep in my own bed. I wake up late, leave the couch to go to work, and can't wait to come back home 11 hours later to sit on the couch again.

Can you think of any worse programming to watch when you're burned out and supposed to be resting than the Olympics?

It's hard enough for me to sit still and take some time off when the biggest sporting event in 4 years ISN'T happening. It makes me want to drink. See, burnout and inspiration are a pretty fucked up mix. You want to get out there and tear it up and train like an animal, but at the same time you can't even seem to scrape yourself off the couch for long enough to change into pajamas, let alone go for a run, or wake up at 4:30 to go swimming.

So even though you're SUPPOSED to be resting, and this is what you've PLANNED to do, you feel guilty about it, because Dara Torres is 15 years older than you, and she still looks SO much better than you do.

... And sooner or later you are going to come to the conclusion that you are a total loser.

In fact, it feels a lot like being hung over: there are all these things that need to get done, but instead you're sitting on your couch watching TV all day eating pizza and feeling depressed. You SWEAR that this is the last time, tomorrow will be different. But tomorrow is NEVER different. So if you're going to feel this shitty anyway, why not drink?

Don't worry, I haven't. I feel shitty enough as it is, I don't need booze fucking up my life even further. And anyways, I used to feel like this before I really started hitting the bottle hard anyway. Back before I drank, I used to slash my wrists up when I felt like this. Because, yes, I really am crazy. Just, when I'm training, I tend to hide it better. And training makes me feel much more comfortable in a tank top than the alternative. Training is the only thing that makes the Crazy Claire go away.

But I can't seem to drag my ass off the couch.

So I was able to assuage my guilt a little bit, knowing that on Sunday, August 17 (today), I would go back to training. I could be as lazy and fat a blob as I wanted before then, because on August 17, IT'S ON!

Last night I watched the women's marathon. For each event Mom and I decide which athlete we are so that we have someone to rout for. I called Dina Castor. I dropped out of the marathon after only about 2 miles. Mom was Paula Radcliffe (her second choice, it turns out that Frank Shorter wasn't running the women's marathon this year). At least she finished, in what was arguably the most inspiring finish of the race: sticking it out through what was obviously a painful injury, just to prove to the British press that she wasn't a quitter. I watched Constantina Tomescu-Dita run almost twice as fast as I run a marathon, then I watched Dara Torres swim across a 50 meter pool faster than I can swim across a 25 yard pool. Then I went to bed (not the couch), and tossed and turned for hours. I got less than 4 hours' sleep before I got up at 4:00 to drive to the upper left-hand corner of Massachusetts to run a 20 mile trail race. Hopefully this would snap me out of my funk. I was tired.


... This had better work...

I saw Gadfly Thom before the race and he explained that it was a new course. They were doing 2 10-mile loops this year, rather than 1 20-mile out and back to cut down on the need for volunteers. Oh yeah, and on top of the course being very hilly and covered in roots, he'd heard that today it was muddy.

... And something about river crossings?...

We started running and the first mile went well. Before the second mile was halfway done, though, my shoes were soaked. I'd managed to prance around the outside of the giant mud pits for the first mile, but eventually I aimed for a solid-looking spot, landed, and was ankle deep in shoe-sucking mud.

Crappy cameraphone. Trust me, that's all shoe-sucking mud.

And it happened again, and again, and again. I was slipping all over the course. Everyone was. With mud caked all over our shoes, and some of the rockiest, rootiest, most technical trails I have ever run on, we were taking the slippery mud to places that were not covered in slippery mud before.

And that was when you could FIND the trail. A dozen of us went off course in the second mile. Around the 6th mile we went off course again and climbed a mountain that did not need climbing. The single-track trail was extremely overgrown in many places (the few places not covered in shoe-sucking mud pits), and even if you could distinguish the trail from the rest of the underbrush, you couldn't always see what kind of terrain was under it. I would be surprised if there was a whole minute that went by where I didn't trip or slip. The winner of the race said that he fell down a total of 7 times. We must have had to climb over 100 fallen trees in the 10-mile loop. I knew it was just a matter of time before my toe caught on one of them and I bit it.

There was a 4-mile race going on at the same time, and when we reached the turn-off sometime in the third mile and I considered taking a left rather than a right, I knew that I was not going to finish this race. I did eventually take the left to follow the long course, but I already knew my heart wasn't in it.

"Godforsaken" was a word that one man used to describe the course. But it wasn't really anything too, too bad. It's not like it was impossible. Very hard, but finishable. My heart just wasn't in it. I knew I could finish, if I wanted to. I just really, really, really didn't want to.

Luckily, since everyone kept getting lost, the field never had a chance to spread out much. I always had people around me. I mentioned that I planned to drop out to a couple of the guys slipping through a mud pit with me, and they tried to convince me otherwise. "No, really, you don't understand," I said. "I just really, really DON'T WANT to finish."

Have you ever felt a nagging injury and known that this time, if you push through it, you'll be out for the season? That's how my brain felt. It was time to call it quits. Problem was, I still had about 7 miles to go.

At about mile 7 an invisible trail lead up a mountain. At first it was steep, then it became a wall. There were a couple of times when I stood next to a course marker tied to a branch looking in all directions trying to figure out where in this vertical rock face they really expected me to go?! There was a point near the top when I was scrambling up the rock on all fours that I actually started to get dizzy. I hadn't eaten anything since I got out of the car, and hadn't really paid much attention to my hydration. For whatever reason, I felt bad and for a moment I thought of just sitting down where I was. Someone else could figure out how to get me off this damned mountain, but I wasn't moving another step.

But I kept going, and the view was worth it.

I just didn't feel like I had to see it again on a second loop.

As I was running down the hill (once I COULD run again, still swinging around tree trunks to steady myself whenever possible), I heard someone crashing through the woods behind me. "Just let me know when you want to come around," I yelled.
"Alright," he said in an Indian accent. I knew exactly who it was. It's not like there were dozens of Indian guys lined up at the start. When he came around, I don't know what possessed me to follow him and start up a conversation. He was running much faster than I was, and up until now I hadn't much felt like talking to anyone.

I'm a bit hard of hearing, and with him in front of me and speaking with an accent, I only caught about half of what was said, but I ran after him anyways. Fast. The truth is, I felt okay and was probably running better than I had at any other point in the race. I just really, REALLY didn't want to do a second loop of this bullshit. I told him as much. He said that he was quitting after the first loop too. Maybe that's why I decided to talk to him, because he wasn't trying to urge me on. Some people need to mind their own business.

Somehow we got to talking about cycling. I told him about the time I rode in the Adirondacks and it was so hilly I wound up crying by the time I got back to my car. "Your endurance must be really good to ride over 100 miles," he said.
"It's a heck of a lot easier than running a marathon," I said. Then we talked about running, about how I hate running, about how he loves running.
"So what kind of distances do you run?" he asked. "Do you run trail or road more?"
I didn't know how to answer him. "I guess I usually run on road," I said. "But I'm trying to become an ultrarunner this fall... and learn how to run fast at the same time." Then a lightbulb went off. "I don't know why I do it," I said. "I hate running. I really do. And I'm no good at it at all. I just can't seem to get any better. But cycling I like. And I'm good at it."
"Well, you can always become a better runner if you really work at it," he said. I've heard that one before, I thought.
At that moment it dawned on me that maybe I really didn't care enough to work at it. Why bother, if I hate it so much? I mean, really, who did I think I was fooling?

We pulled up on another group of runners. Sri (which was his name) dashed on ahead, but I was too lazy to keep up the effort to keep up with him. We were in another muddy patch, and I preferred to pick my footing more carefully.
"How you doing?" asked a woman who had heard me talk about pulling out before.
"You know... running," I said.
"How you feeling?"
"Fine, I guess," I said.
"Why don't you come along for the second loop?"
"Not a chance," I said.
"Aw, come on, you can do it!" said a chick that I had long ago decided was the hottest chick on the trail.
"I know I can. Just because you CAN do something, doesn't always mean you should."
"You can walk it. Come on, don't quit. Keep going with us!" I have done much stranger things to talk to a girl than simply running an extra 10 miles through the mud. But not today.
"You know, I really don't feel bad about it. I know I could keep going, I just really, really don't want to. I'd rather quit this race today than keep going and burn out so badly I quit running altogether." I didn't know if that last sentence was true or not.

When I got to the end I went up to the men with the bulletin board full of numbers and I said, "I'm done."
"You're not going to run anymore?"
"Nope."
"Why don't you just sit here for a little while and have a snack and see if in a little while..."
"Nope, I'm done. I don't want to run anymore. I'm not going to change my mind."
"Is everything okay?" They looked concerned. I have a feeling a lot of runners had been complaining about the course.
"Yeah. I'm fine. I just am not really in the mood to run today. If the course were just difficult, or if it were just the mud, I'd be all in. Today's just not the day."
"Okay then," they said. And they let me be.

My shoes looked much worse than this before, but we ran through a knee-deep river shortly before the finish, so they were cleaned off a bit.
Not the greatest picture my shitty camera phone has ever taken. Apparently the back of my shirt looked pretty bad too, but I didn't want to see what my butt ACTUALLY looks like in a pair of skin-tight shorts, so I asked him to just take a picture of my legs.

I still got to eat the food, though, and as I sat there eating my orzo salad and corn on the cob (trail races DO have the best food and the best hospitality), I noticed that I was in good company. There were 2 Western States veterans who had also gone for the "10-mile option". If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. Before I left, the winner came in in about 3 hours and 20 minutes. I finished Eastern States (road) 20 miler in 3 hours and 13 minutes! I am many things, but a fast runner I am not. Even the winners seemed pretty miffed at the difficulty of the course. I didn't regret my decision.

In the car on the way home I had 3 hours to think. To say that I regretted my decision would be false, but I did beat up on myself quite a bit for quitting ANYTHING that I set out to do, even if it turns out that I didn't want to do it. The thought of doing about ten more long trail races this fall made me even more upset. What was I thinking?

Why am I even TRYING to run 50 miles? I hate running, and I suck at it. Riding my bike, on the other hand, I LOVE doing that. And after nearly 10 straight days of watching the best athletes in the world, all I could think about was, Why am I wasting time doing something that I hate, that I'm no good at, when I've found something that I love, and I AM good at? I can be a shitty runner when I'm older, why don't I just concentrate on what I'm good at now?

When I thought about it really hard, I decided that I was NOT in the best cycling shape I felt like I could be in, because I'd been concentrating so hard on trying to not be such a shitty runner. Then a thought that had been cooking in the back of my mind for awhile bubbled to the surface:

Why don't you quit this triathlon bullshit already, and just do what you love?

The jury's still out on the answer to that question.

I have disallowed comments because within 12 hours of posting I already had 2 comments that fit into the categories below. I don't want to hear the following:
A) Don't be so hard on yourself. You need time to recover. Take more time off than just 2 weeks. (Screw you, I need this).
B) Noooooo! This is your dream. Don't get discouraged! You can do it! (If you say this, maybe you need to check yourself. Is it MY dream or YOURS? When exactly have you heard me say it was my dream?)
C) Don't worry. We all have bad days. (While you're REALLY thinking, Weakling! I TOTALLY would have finished that race!)
D) You are NOT a shitty runner! And something else to the tune of "Group hugs all around!"
E) No suggestions that I will someday beat Karen Smyers at the time trial. YOU people made that up, not me!

Beyond the marathon

Alternate names for this post:

I Have a Cowbell and You Don't

Things That Suck Giant Donkey Balls and Things That Don't
There's More Than One Way to Skin a P... never mind

I've always wanted to do ultramarathons, and the gateway drug into ultramarathon addictions is the 50K. It's technically an ultra, but it's a "soft" ultra, an ultra "light" if you will. Still, 50 kilometers is 31 miles, and since they're usually on trails, the terrain doesn't tend to make it easy for you. Sometime in my Boston marathon taper, (when I thought I was invincible and could do anything), I decided that I could do a 50K NOW. I wrote to a few friends, and they cautioned me that 50K was a long way, that if I wasn't comfortable with marathons, and I don't usually run on trails, then maybe I should put it off until I was better prepared. They think I can't do it! I raged (remember, I was tapering and I was grouchy). That same night I got a flier for the Pineland Farms 50K in the mail, and it seemed like fate. Even still, I didn't tell anyone about my plans. Sure, Gretchen, Mindy, and Cranky knew, but no one else. If too many people told me I shouldn't do it, I might start to believe them. Then I'd be out $40.

And the other reason why I didn't say much about it was just in case I failed, I wouldn't have to tell anyone. I could just pretend like it didn't happen. I realize that I'm a fairly weak runner and I was prepared to walk the last 10 miles if I had to. I was prepared to come in dead stinkin' last. I just wanted to see what was on the other side of that 26.2 mile line. However, since a 50K is about as painless as you can go in the ultramarathon world, at times it was easy to forget that this race was actually longer than a marathon. I was about as keyed up about it as I would be for a fifteen mile run.

I was all ready to wake up at 5:00 to make the 10:00 am start, and that's what I would have done if I hadn't checked the race web site just one more time before bed and seen that my race started at 8:00! Shit! Disaster averted, I set my alarm for 3:45 and went to bed, where I stayed awake for a few hours before finally falling asleep. In the morning I was on target to leave at about 5:00... well, maybe 5:05, until I went to plug the address into the GPS in the car and discovered I'd copied the address down wrong. I had to go back inside, print up new directions, blah, blah, blah. I finally hit the road around 5:15.

I drove right over to my local Starbucks where I could see the Hungarian early morning ladies getting ready for the day, but they were still closed for another 10 minutes. So I got back in the car and headed north, waiting until after 5:30 and pulling off for another Starbucks that I knew was near the highway. I pulled up and... it was also closed. Fuck. Driving north towards the New Hampshire border I kept telling the GPS to find the nearest Starbucks until it found one that was near the highway and wouldn't require any doubling back. It was about 6:00 now, and I knew that all the Starbucks in North America must be open at this point. I pulled off the highway, pissed off the bitchy lady that lives in the GPS who seems so peeved when you don't follow HER rout, and finally managed to find the local Starbucks at about 6:20. To my relief, the lemon-shaped lamps inside were on. To my greater relief I could see two employees behind the counter inside. And to my great surprise, the door was locked. Some cyclists were across the street, and I asked them if they knew what the fuck was up. Starbucks doesn't open until 6:30, neither did this other coffee shop across the street. They would be open in 10 minutes, but I didn't have 10 minutes anymore. "Fuck!" I said. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" I ran back to my car and noticed that the restaurant that I'd parked at had a giant "Open" flag hanging over the door. I tried the door. Not open. Fuck. And now I had to pee.

Finally I found an open Starbucks at a rest stop in Kittery, went to the bathroom, and dashed out to my car. At the very, very best, now I could only arrive 25 minutes before the start. What if they closed registration? Really, I had nothing to worry about. I wasn't even the last person in the parking lot and made it to the starting line with plenty of time to pee and drop my stuff in the car.

The course was two 25 km loops (15.5 miles) that were impossibly wound-up on themselves, which meant that you were never far from an aid station. The 50 mile runners (who'd left at 6:00 AM) would do a 3.5 mile add-on before doing 3 loops, and the 25K race started at 10:00 to do one loop of the course.

I ran with a camera all day, but this was the only picture I bothered to take. Oops. The rest of the pictures from the course are taken from the photos at last year's race on the web site.

The race director yelled something about the course that I didn't hear, and then a cow bell was rung to send us off (I think), and we went... sort of. That's what I love about trail running, people start running-ish, jogging-ish, but no one's really in a hurry. I'd hardly used my legs all week, so I was feeling really great, but I ran-ish, jogged-ish with everyone else, and when we hit the first hill, I stopped and walked with everyone else. If the person in front of me was going slow, I slowed down rather than going around them. We ran in a big pack for the first several miles until the course finally sifted us out.

I found myself running with a guy with a hydration pack. I ran when he ran, walked when he walked, and when everyone else was gone and we were still together, I introduced myself. I would get to know a lot about Jay over the next several hours, as we ran the whole, entire course together. He'd run several 50's of both the metric and English standard variety, although he wasn't a total trail nerd by nature. "These people are crazy," Jay whispered to me after we'd been running together for a few miles. The few other people that I talked to were a bit loopy, and I was glad I'd fallen into step with Jay and not the crazy lady who couldn't stop talking about the black flies in her front yard, or the guy tooting his own horn about his 20 years of ultrarunning experience who still hadn't finished Western States (that's all he talked about).

Jay was in the army and had some unspecified job with the Department of Homeland Security. He'd served in both the Clinton and Bush administration. I was really interested to hear about Jay's experiences with combat, his political opinions, his thoughts about Bush, and his thoughts on war, but there are so many questions that you just can't ask a soldier. "Tell me," I said, "do you miss it?"
"What?" he asked.
"War."
"You must know some people in the military..." he said. I'll admit it, I'm totally intrigued by the military. I have my GI Jane fantasies (no, not that kind of fantasy), and might have wound up in the military if I didn't have to kill anyone, shoot anything, follow orders, or eat meat, and I could walk away whenever I wanted to. I was hoping that Jay would have some great and inspirational stories about intense physical missions, but later in the race when I asked him if he had any, he said, "Nah, nothing like this."
"Well, what about boot camp?" I asked.
"Boot camp isn't as bad as people think it is. If you sat on the couch for 4 years in high school you might have a hard time of it, but if you were an athlete in high school, it's nothing you wouldn't be used to." I was disappointed. If I was going to run with an army guy, I was hoping that he could at least yell insults at me and make me dig deep inside myself to "be all that I could be" or something. He said that the one thing that one of his basic trainees had filed a formal complaint against his unit about was that his drill instructor made the trainee eat cookies until he puked. Hell, I knew people who did that kind of thing for fun! Instead, as time went on, we fell silent, and by the second loop we barely spoke anymore. We just had a tacit agreement that we were going to be in this together, and when one walked, the other walked, when one ran, the other ran, we waited for each other at aid stations, and we paced each other through the whole, entire race.

The race web site describes the course like this: "The trails are wide and non-technical, but very hilly. Although there are no major climbs the rolling terrain is unrelenting." I was afraid that the trails would be like my trails at home that are so rocky, rooty, and steep that I find it hard to average faster than an 11:00 mile, even when I don't walk. However, the "trails" were more like paths: grass-covered paths through the woods, or paths trampled through the tall grass in rolling fields. In fact, the only part that was hard on the joints were the paths through the fields that were slightly banked, and real hard on your uphill ankle. The rolling hills were endless, but the uphills weren't so bad, since we were walking them, and there were only a few knee-busting downhills. Grades tended to stay below the 20% mark, but there were several spots where it reached up to 30% both up and down. We had a cumulative elevation gain and loss of 7,900', which was much less severe than it could have been. I thought ultramarathons had to climb tens of thousands of feet for anyone to sign up. Luckily, I was wrong.

My body felt great, until sometime between miles 7 and 10, all of a sudden, it didn't. My butt started doing that thing that my butt does where it gets tight and sore. I started getting that awful heartburn that I got in the Adirondacks. Jay stopped to use the bathroom and I shuffled on ahead for a few minutes without him. Without Jay to pace me, I felt like I weighed a million pounds. I was running along on a flat with a woman whose shuffle could barely be called "running" in its loosest definition of the word. When Jay caught back up I was able to pick up his pace and trot away. Still, I knew I had to do something, or today was going to "suck giant donkey balls" (Mindy's phrase, not mine). I started hitting my bottle hard, emptying it before every aid station. It was getting hot, and I started drinking a dixie cup or two of Gatorade while they were refilling my bottle. I alternated between Gatorade, plain water, and Nuun at each aid station. I ate potatoes, candy orange slices, Twizzlers, bananas, anything that appealed to me. The aid stations were great, with more food than I've ever seen at any road race or triathlon, even the ones that cost three times as much as this event. "Man, I never thought I'd see the day when I didn't want to eat another Twizzler," I told Jay as I continued chewing on the waxy mess well after the aid station. I'd started chewing on Twizzlers to quit smoking, and kicked the butts, but wound up with a nasty Twizzler habit. Twizzler addiction or not, stuffing my face seemed to work though and whether it was the fluid, the food, the Gatorade, or the Nuun that did it, I started to feel stronger again a couple of miles in to the second loop.

"Stronger" is a relative term. Every time we stopped running I was so relieved at the chance to walk, but after awhile a deep, dull ache would set into all the muscles in my legs and I would NEED to run again to clear it out. And so it went: walk, run, walk, run, walk, run, repeat until you hit an aid station, stuff your face and start over. It was getting pretty damned hot too. The temperatures were in the mid-70's, which is hotter than anything I've gotten to train in this year, and the sun was strong. It wasn't such a problem in the woods where there was shade, but running across those fields it was really beating down.

About half way through the second loop Jay and I came up behind a man who was hunched over, and was tipping over so far to the right that his right ear was on his shoulder, and only the left side of his body seemed to be moving. It was a wonder he wasn't just pivoting around in circles. "Great job," I said as we passed him, and that was when I got a good look at his face. It was my old nemesis, GRANDPA! At the time we thought that he was only doing the 25K, but as it turned out, he was in the 50K. The way the course was set up, you had to pass the finishing area each loop, in order to do a smaller 5-mile loop on the other side. As Jay and I came through the finishing area I tried to spot Mindy, who was supposed to be volunteering. It was crowded, so instead I shouted out to the first person I saw on the other side of the tape, "Hey, if you see a girl on crutches, will you tell her Grandpa's here?! She'll know what I mean." Mindy's Grandpa's biggest fan. The stranger at the finish line looked confused, but I figured it was a simple enough instruction: "crutches", "grandpa". He'd find her, and she'd know what I meant.

I finished my second marathon in just over a month in 5:04, hit the lap button, and kept running. Amazingly, that isn't even my slowest marathon of my life. In an exchange of no more than two sentences, Jay and I decided to run more for the last 5 miles. "Let's get this over with," I said.
"Hell yeah," he breathed, and we kept running. I was surprised at one point to look down and see that we were doing about 9:20 miles. It may have only lasted a few seconds, but I was surprised that my body could still go that fast. To be honest, I was tired and sore and ready to get off my feet, but I wasn't feeling as bad as I thought I would be. A few miles back we'd run into a guy (walking backwards up a hill, I know how that feels!) who had said that the loop was half a mile short, meaning we would have to run one fewer mile. When it turned out that he was wrong, I was suprised that I didn't really mind. Maybe it was because Jay was still there. "I don't need to stop at the last aid station," I said. It was less than a mile from the finish.
"I'm going to stop and have one last drink," Jay said. "You can go on without me if you want."
"Hell no! I've been with you for this long, I'm not going to run ahead now to save a measly minute." So we stopped and had one more cup of Gatorade, ate one more handful of candy, and trotted on towards the finish line.

"Are you particular about your finishing photo?" I asked. "Because I'll be more than happy to hang back 10 seconds so you can get a good shot."
"I didn't even look at it last year," he said. "Did YOU really want to be alone in that photo?"
I hadn't run this race alone, why would I want to be alone in the photo? "Jay, I would be honored to cross the finish line with you, and I would be just as honored to cross right behind you." We joked about how preposterous it would be if we had a final sprint in the finishing chute, and how badass it would be if I pushed him, the army guy, out of the way for the win. As the finish line came into view I said, "Jay, it has been a pleasure and an honor. Thank you so much for taking me through this." We didn't join hands, we didn't stick our arms in the air, we didn't yell, or scream, or whoop, we just crossed the finish line together in 6:03:30. There wasn't even a photographer there.
As they tore the tabs off the bottom of our numbers, the volunteers asked, "Do you guys care who comes in first?" We both agreed that it made no difference in the world.

I'm so proud that we managed to actually pick it up at the end!

We began to walk away, when Jay remembered the finisher's prize for the race: a silver cowbell! "Guess what, I got a fever..." Jay said to the volunteer who stared at him blankly. "And the only prescription is..." his face fell. "Do you know what I'm talking about?" She didn't. "More cowbell!" Jay said, a little defeted that she didn't get the reference.

All I wanted to do was sit down and never get up again, but there was a free barbecue, and I decided it would be nice to have a veggie burger when I went to my final resting place, so I got in line behind Jay for the food. I saw Steven there, who had just finished the 50 mile race, and looked like he hadn't totally recovered his faculties. He was sunburned, shoeless, shoving macaroni salad in his face as fast as he could, and full sentences were a challenge. It was Jay who spotted Mindy first. "I see a girl over there on crutches, but she's not blond." Why do I always think Mindy's blond? While I was catching up with Mindy at the condiment table, Jay stole away and I never saw him again. I wished I could have thanked him one more time.

Mindy had to see about her volunteering responsibilities, and I had to see about my veggie burger, so I wandered over to a bale of hay and sat down to watch the crowd. These people didn't look like they'd just run 30-50 miles. After a marathon people look like a bunch of grouchy zombies, but these people were smiling and hugging and laughing. Why, right over there was a chick in an Ironman jersey who looked as fresh as a daisy. It seemed like an odd fashion choice for a trail run, but hell, if you can do an ironman and run something like this looking as fresh as that, you can wear whatever the hell you want. I started to feel like I would never hack it in the ultraendurance world. I'd seen so many Mdot tattoos on the calves of people passing me today. The chick in the ironman jersey was on the move, coming towards me. Then she waved... at me! Oh my god, it was Nitsirk and Dr. Nick, I felt like such an idiot! We talked a bit about running and ironman and how I'm NEVER doing Lake Placid. I mentioned that I might do Coer d'Alene next year, because it looked pretty flat.
"Flat?! That one's as hilly as Placid, if not more!" said Dr. Nick. But... but... I'd looked at the course comparisons online. Coer d'Alene looks flat-ish. Go here, and tell me what you see.

"Well, we should get going, and you should take a shower," Nitsirk said. "You're kind of... salty..."
I set off on the long walk back towards my car and they went to get their bikes. When they came up behind me, Dr. Nick said, "You're walking kinda' bow-legged..."
"Yeah, I've got some personal chafing issues," I admitted. Think of the worst place to possibly chafe, and I was cut up pretty bad there.
Is it your nipples? Noooo. Not even close.
Is it your... inner thighs? Noooo. But you're getting warmer.
Is it... between your butt cheeks? Nooooo. But you're getting even warmer.
Gasp! Is it your... you know, your.... Yes. I had worn a hole in my "no-no place" and I was going to walk like I'd just gotten off a horse, no matter who could see me. It had been bugging me the whole second loop.
"Oh my god, be careful in the shower!" was Nitsirk's parting advice.
Peeling off my clothes was interesting. My feet looked like hell. I had dark rings of dirt around my ankles, my chest was all chafed up, I had salt all over me, and once again, for the second week in a row, I had bled into my shorts (this time from the chafing). When you're chafed, a shower can be torture as the water washes all the sweat from your skin into the wound. When I went to wash my no-no place, I almost screamed out loud. When I was dressed (and wearing clean underwear) I waddled out to meet Mindy.

Mindy was crutching around the finishing area handing out gold cowbells, pint glasses, and gators to the 50 mile finishers, and I stuck around for a couple of hours to help her out. Really, after seeing her hobbling around trying to unload glasses and cowbells out of boxes while on crutches, you couldn't help but help her. The only shirt I had with me was a dark, long-sleeved t-shirt that definitely wasn't going to cut it in this heat, so I swallowed my pride and helped hand out cowbells in nothing but jeans and a sports bra. I felt naked as the day I was born, but it beat the hell out of walking all the way back to my car to get a short sleeved t-shirt. God, I wish I had a 6-pack!

People crossed the finish line looking alright or looking like hell, but everyone said please and thank you. No one yelled at the volunteers. I wasn't the only one who'd come back from my shower to help out, either. "Everyone's just so nice!" Mindy gushed over and over. I really love the trail crowd. Everyone helps everyone else, even if it means losing a couple of seconds. They're cheap races in beautiful places, and everyone is just so supportive and kind. It makes me wonder why people would do triathlons at all, where the athletes think it's their prerogative to yell at the aid station volunteers whenever they want, and it's standard procedure to push the cheating envelope for a 2-second advantage. God forbid it take you an extra second to get a bottle.

It was getting late, but Grandpa was still on the course. I wanted to see him finish, but there was talk of a cut-off time. The course cut-off was at 7:00 pm, 11 hours after the 50K start. Grandpa finished his first loop when I was already finished (I think). I wanted him to finish so badly. I couldn't say that I beat him if he never finished. There were two 50K guys out still there, both in their 70's. Both were experienced runners that had hundreds of marathons between them, but both were s l o w. At this point, there were about 8 1/2 hours on the clock. As I tried to imagine what it would be like to run 31 miles in 11 hours, I couldn't. Can you imagine the mental toughness it would take to drag your old ass 30 miles at a 20-minute mile? Especially with the horrible posture that Grandpa had. Can you imagine how heartbreaking it would be if someone came up on a 4x4 after 25 miles and told you you had to quit? My heart went out to Grandpa. I couldn't stick around to see him finish but, God I hope he did. I came home with a new respect for Grandpa. Grandpa is the baddest assest mofo of them all. I still beat him though.

By the time I had a couple of veggie burgers in me, I felt a lot better. I was having no problems moving around, and I was able to stand up and sit down with ease. Stairs weren't a problem. When I'd finished I'd felt like I could have gone one more mile... and then one more... and then one more... After Boston last month I felt like I'd been beat up for 2 days afterwards. Today I don't feel half as bad as I did after the marathon, despite the extra 5 miles and endless hills. I guess what they say about the pounding on the road and the virtues of the walk/run really is true. Watching all those people finish the 50 miler really made me feel like there was so much farther to go, so much more left to do. Maine Runner (who's training for Western States) had me practically drooling with jealousy as he talked about his training and fitness. Could I have run one more loop? One of the purposes of this race was to figure out if I wanted to attempt my first 50-mile race in November. Before I even left Maine, I had my answer.