It really has been a while since I posted here, hasn't it? Other than a couple of mediocre marathon results (3:09:27 at Baltimore, 3:12:01 on a brutally cold day at NCR Trail Marathon, neither good enough to qualify me for Boston), there hasn't been much to post about, because I haven't been running much. Ever since Badwater this past July, it's been a struggle, physically and mentally, to get any sort of running momentum going.
Call it burnout, maybe, but the good news was, coming into Hellgate, I was finally physically and mentally back in the game. Yes, my training mileage has been low (almost 40 miles in the week before Hellgate, which is, relatively speaking, a lot lately), but my I was feeling good doing it, and feeling enthusiastic about doing it. And since Hellgate, with its midnight start, is at least as much of a mental game as a physical one, I had a good feeling about this race.
The drive to the race, solo this year, was uneventful, except for a few signs (one on a trash truck that said "Satisfaction guaranteed or double your trash back," and a "Romney/Ryan" campaign sign posted over an Endless Caverns sign by the side of the road, above the caverns' tag line "The fun and excitement never end."), that I now regret not taking pictures of. I got to Camp Bethel early (before Horton's pre-dinner prayer), was one of the first few in line for dinner (which, now that I am gluten-free, was a disappointing array of green beans in tomato sauce, and salad with Italian dressing), and sat through the pre-race briefing, even though the only "random prize" that I gained for this effort was the disturbing news that Horton would be undergoing a septuple-bypass surgery on Monday (side note: I sincerely hope that he's okay). Nevertheless, Horton was as energetic and engaging as he always is, even joking that he couldn't help move chairs around because of his "heart condition," and by the end of the briefing, the collective nervousness at the pre-race dinner had vanished. With all of that wrapped up by 8:30 p.m., it was back to the back seat of my car for a couple of hours, where I would attempt sleep and fail miserably.
Two hours later, I was cramming myself into the back seat of an SUV with Jackie and Alan, and feeling a lot less nervous about this endeavor than I thought I should be. Maybe the fact that Jackie was enthusiastically coordinating her crew and pacer plans, while Alan was spouting seemingly obscure facts about the trail, made me feel as though my "I'm going to run in the woods for a while" attitude was perhaps too nonchalant. But before I had time to really re-think my lack of strategy, we were at the Hellgate parking lot, and it was time for me to chug a coffee drink, head to the starting line, fist-bump Snipes for luck, and head off down the trail.
The start was "slow" . . . for about the first two minutes, and then the leaders really took off, aided by the relatively flat, smooth trail, and the lack of any water crossings or significant water of any sort on the trail. With a starting temperature in the 40s, when the typical temperature is somewhere in the teens, this really was turning into "Wussgate," as Horton derisively nicknamed this year's edition of the race. For my part, I held back a bit, and came through the first "3.5" trail/Horton miles in about 36 minutes, having lost some ground to the lead pack. I felt comfortable, though, and as we headed up the 4-ish mile road climb to Aid Station #2, I started really settling in, and even passed a few people on the climb. This was truly exciting to me, since it had been a very long time since I had felt good in any race, much less an ultra, much less such a long climb in an ultra. I passed through Aid Station #2, "7.5" miles, in 1 hour, 13 minutes, feeling as though this was going to be a good night.
Shortly after Aid Station #2, though, everything changed. As I navigated the steep, rocky single-track trail downhill past Aid Station #2, the jostling in my stomach became unbearable, so I stopped for about five minutes to, um, use the woods. I thought that I would feel better, but I came back to the trail feeling absolutely terrible. Totally out of rhythm, no energy in my legs, and within 10 or 15 minutes, I had to use the woods again. Between Aid Station #2 and Aid Station #4, I stopped to use the woods another five times, each time losing a few minutes for the stop, but many more minutes in increased lethargy when I returned to the trail. What felt like dozens of people were passing me. At the rate at which this was worsening, I was convinced that I would have to drop (possibly, quite literally, in a heap on the ground) at Aid Station #4, about 26 miles in.
Somehow, though, I made it to Aid Station #4, at which point my stomach was pretty close to empty, and therefore, a much less significant detriment to progress. Not feeling very well, but determined to make this work, I pressed onward. Not having to stop so frequently to use the woods seemed to help, and I started picking up the pace. About halfway to Aid Station #5, as the trail turned to wide, grassy downhill, I was finally able to really get moving again . . . just enough to miss a switchback and continue about a mile further downhill. Once the trail got scrubby enough, and I realized that, on the current path, I wasn't getting any closer to the bouncing headlamps below me, I turned around, jogged back uphill, and got back on course - about 20 minutes lost there. I continued more cautiously from here, and, while tiptoeing my way over some rocky downhill, Jackie came blazing past me, blasting Blink-182 on her headphones. This was enough to shake the remains of my apathy. No way was Jackie going to beat me to the bottom of this hill. I picked my way through the rocks with increased vigor, and once the trail got smooth again, I really opened up, passing Jackie, and totally confusing her, since she hadn't noticed passing me in the first place. We continued on to Aid Station #5, Jackie just a bit behind me, with just one stop, as a lack of markers around a corner induced brief paranoia that I may have gone off-course again.
Determined to maintain this momentum, I tanked up on Gu Brew and mentally prepared myself to attack the steep climb out of Aid Station #5. The first year that I ran Hellgate (2009), this climb felt impossibly steep and long (and, in a relative sense, it is), so I knew that it would be a huge confidence boost to stay strong in this section of the race. Sure enough, I fell into a rhythm reminiscent of that on the climb to Aid Station #2, and now I was passing people, people who were (duly) looking ragged and spent. As the sun rose, and the path turned from single-track to road to single-track to road again, I recalled Hellgate last year, when I reached Aid Station #6 at around 7:15 a.m. This time, in spite of borderline catastrophe, I was on pace to reach Aid Station #6 at around 7:30 a.m., which, discounting my 20-minute detour, actually had me ahead of last year's pace. Seeing Jordan Chang's crew driving down from Aid Station #6, cheering for me on the climb, had me feeling far more optimistic than I had been in hours. I knew that I had to be gaining ground, and now, in full daylight, I was excited to chase the runners ahead of me for the rest of the race.
But with about 2.5 miles to go to reach Aid Station #7, the "42.5 mile" mark, having passed a few more people since Aid Station #6, the race-ending disaster struck. I started feeling overwhelmingly weak, overwhelmingly hungry, and somewhat disoriented. I did the only thing I could do at the time, which was to go slower, drink more, and hope that I would come back around quickly. But in spite of my efforts to back off, it got worse and worse, until finally, I sat down by the side of the trail, lowered my head, closed my eyes, and saw, against a white background, two black bars on either side, and rapidly-shifting symbols between the black bars. This was, in technical terms, "not good."
I begged gels off of the runners that passed, and told them that it was okay to tell people at the next aid station that I was in trouble and to send help. But even after 7 gels and an hour of lethargic stumbling down the trail, I still wasn't at the next aid station, and at least twice the number of people that I had passed since my "comeback" had passed me. In wet clothes, moving slowly, my hypoglycemic, nutritionally-deprived condition was now complicated with hypothermia.
Finally, at around 10:15 a.m., I reached Aid Station 7, entirely under my own power, feeling weak, listless, shivering uncontrollably, lips turning blue. (Whoever they sent out to search for me never found me.) Horton and his heart condition were looking far better than I was (I would later learn that, given my symptoms, I was at far greater risk of death at the moment than he was), and he helped me into a chair near the fire, while aid station volunteers brought me broth and hamburgers, both of which sounded good back when I was on the trail and feeling better, but now uniformly tasted like cardboard. One girl was particularly helpful in bringing me gloves, a hat, a jacket, and a sleeping bag, but when it was clear that even these efforts weren't working fast enough, they helped me get into a truck, where they turned the heater on and closed the doors. Still shivering, wrapped in random clothes, I slumped over onto the steering wheel, which apparently was very comfortable as a pillow given my physical state. I don't remember a lot of what happened here, other than people were periodically opening the door to check on me, I was drifting in and out of consciousness, and there may have been a sugar pill placed under my tongue at some point.
About two hours later, I got out of the truck, finally no longer freezing, shed my clothes, and walked around a bit. The sun was out and the temperature was in the mid-60s. I didn't feel terribly sore, and I almost felt good enough to run again, albeit slowly. But at this point, it was just a few minutes until the 12:30 p.m. cutoff time at this aid station, and continuing now would mean that, if I couldn't get any momentum going again, I would risk not making it to the finish line by 6:00 p.m., the cutoff for the race. It would also likely mean a slow, miserable slog, putting me nowhere close to a goal finishing time. Most importantly, since I still hadn't sorted out everything that had led to my collapse-in-a-heap disaster in the first place, it would put me at risk for another near-death experience.
I decided that two strikes in one race was bad enough, and I didn't want to risk a third, and so, at Aid Station #7, I chose not to continue. Instead, I rode back to the finish area, and hung around to cheer for the finishers - among them, Jackie, second woman, in a little under 14 hours, Snipes and Mike crossing the line in the mid-16s, and Alan toughing it out to finish about 15 minutes before the 6:00 p.m. cutoff. After some grazing at the finish line buffet, I headed off with Jackie, Alan, and company, for celebratory dinner at a hibachi grill, followed by a long, dark, solitary drive back to Baltimore.
With the benefit of a few days to process all of this, I think I can finally address the race report's fundamental question: what the hell happened? From a physical standpoint, the majority of that answer was fairly clear, fairly immediately (although not without dispute in its subtleties): due to an upset stomach (possible causes: excess caffeine, bad food, stomach virus), I lost a ton of "stuff" from my system (possible key items: potassium, calcium, sodium) that, given my pace and my nutritional intake (primarily Gu Brew, which, with different sugars and lower caloric density, is not a good substitute for my go-to, Gatorade, and neither of which may have been suitable to replace this sort of loss), was not being replaced and processed quickly enough, resulting in my hypoglycemic/hypothermic state. This sequence of events is particularly frustrating, since apparently, from a pure fitness standpoint, I was in good enough shape to run well, based on my performance in sections of the race where these nutritional issues were not factors. (That said, there may be some element of "first ultra in a while" that compounded this problem - too much time with too little running probably dulls your ability to respond quickly and appropriately to your body's signals.)
But from an emotional standpoint, that answer changed multiple times. I went from running strong to nearly dropping to running strong to nearly dying to finally dropping. Of all of the races that I've run, this one has probably been, from start to finish, the one with the highest highs, lowest lows, and least certain outcome. Considering that I ended up dropping, my initial reaction was disappointment, and it was difficult not to feel totally defeated on the drive home. A day later, it was regret, thinking that there must have been something I could have done better to change the outcome.
But now, a few days later, the reaction has died down, and in my mind, the 2012 edition of Hellgate is a case study in the fragility of running. Years of work and suffering go into fleeting moments of brilliance. And once those moments are gone, we have to decide how hard we want to work, and how much pain and suffering we want to endure, to try to get them back again, knowing full well that we can't really get anything back; we can only hope for an acceptable replica. In spite of the outcome at Hellgate, there were moments of fleeting brilliance, moments of flying headlong down trails and recovering from disaster to emerge even stronger. And in spite of the outcome, I'm thankful for these moments, and, looking back on these moments individually, I feel no less joy in those than I do in any other similar running-related moments in the past. Going forward, I feel no more reluctant in working hard for more of these moments.
I definitely have a lot of thinking to do about what sort of moments of brilliance I'd like to create in 2013. 2013 may or may not include another run at Hellgate. But there will be running, and, in spite of whatever else might happen, there will be brilliance.
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