Race Report: 2012 Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run, and 2012 Bel Air Town Run 5K

At long last, time out from lugging heavy bags through many airports (one of which was Cleveland Hopkins - can't seem to get away from that place) to write about round 2 of my Old Dominion/Bel Air Town Run double.  For those who missed the first round, refer to this: http://tokenrunningblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/week-in-review-29-may-4-june-and-old.html.

Why do it again?  Well, besides feeling as though I could better last year's performance, and the training benefits, this year was to be a "reunion" of sorts.  I ran my first Old Dominion 100 back in 2008, after Collin Anderson talked me into it, with Chris Avedissian crewing for us.  It was only my second 100-mile race, and the race where I met Dave Snipes.  To make a long story short, I endured brutal heat, got lost a few times, including in the last three miles, but managed to sneak in under 24 hours, totally spent.  (It was even more epic than that sentence suggested, but that's not the point here.)

Fast-forward four years, and Collin, who now lives in Utah, was coming out to run Old Dominion again, Chris was coming up from Georgia to crew, and of course, Snipes was going to be there.  Between that, and the tradition of the Bel Air Town Run (shooting for 17 consecutive finishes there), I was excited to continue a weekend of running tradition.

In the week leading up to this ridiculous double, though, my body was less excited.  I felt crummy just about every day, on every run, and I was glad that I was limiting myself to 5 or 6 miles a day, because my body wasn't having much more than that, anyway.  Wednesday midnight Collin pickup antics at BWI (with the cops aggressively forcing cars through that weren't actively picking people up), followed by an epically long last day at work on Thursday, with two late nights with my girlfriend thrown in there, and things leading up to the race weren't particularly restful.

Still, on Friday, Collin and I managed to leave Baltimore around noon, in plenty of time to stop by Whole Foods for his $7.00/gallon chocolate milk ($5.00 for the milk, plus a $2.00 bottle deposit), without any sort of scramble to get on the road, and the 2+ drive via Route 70 and Route 81 was mostly uneventful . . . except for the part where my "crew" sent me a text, around 3 pm, saying that he wasn't going to show up.  Considering that this race uses Succeed electrolyte drink, and my fueling strategy lately depends heavily on Gatorade, this was a potentially serious problem.  Fortunately, it was enough notice for me to stop at the Food Lion to pick up Gatorade and Zip-Lock bags to make drop bags, and to stop at Arby's for dinner.

With drop bags distributed, and the pre-race meeting underway, I was feeling a little better about things.  I calmly ate my Arby's roast beef and cheddar and curly fries with hummus that I had bought at Whole Foods while the race director went through the standard litany of cautions and informations (perhaps most amusing of which was NOT to call 911 at any point during the race, because three counties will show up and there will be a huge mess).  The meeting was over in less than an hour, which gave us plenty of time to organize our things for race day, set up sleeping space in the barn, and hang out with Meg and Charles, who were there to volunteer/crew.  The rain came, as predicted, but was over by 9 pm, leaving behind this rainbow:

Left to right, Collin (in the barn), Charles, Meg, and Lynne, demonstrating a 75% rate of marveling at the double-rainbow.

In other pre-race silliness, in a video that needs no further explanation, Collin was tending to other things:



It turned out that only four of us (Collin, Meg, Charles, and me) were sleeping in the barn - far less than usual, and since we were sort of our own quasi-cohesive group, we could make group decisions such as "turning all the lights off" and "not making lots of noise during the night" so that we could all get some sleep.  We all went to bed a little after 9 pm, and, besides a brief bathroom break at around 1 am, I slept soundly, arguably some of the best sleep that I had all week.

We didn't really need alarms, because shortly after 3 am, people started entering the barn and checking in.  Since everything had been piled neatly the night before, there was no "scramble to get my stuff together" fiasco, and I had plenty of time to put on clothes, A&D ointment (except on my nipples - oops), and eat potato chips before the start of the race.

After a brief prayer, as is custom at the race, we were off for our lap around the fairgrounds, with little fanfare.  Although I had weighed in sort of heavy (138 lbs), I was feeling relatively light and springy, considering that it was 4 am, and compared to how I had been feeling all last week.  I led the charge, with another two runners nearby, and this neck-and-neck race continued through town and up most of the climb on Woodstock Tower Road.  It might be sort of silly to run up this, but it is a "road-grade" climb, and I ran up it last year, so, whatever, I ran up it, and dropped one runner, but the other runner, Oliver Leblond, continued to chase me, and, from the sound of it, he was chasing hard.  We crested the climb and I started bombing down the other side, and he continued the chase.  I wasn't sure how long he could keep this up (I had never run with him before), but it was going to be an interesting race . . .

Especially since at this point, disaster almost struck.  At the bottom of the hill, we reached Boyer, where we were directed to "go up the road, make a left onto the trail, run the trail loop, and come back to the aid station."  My memories of the early parts of the race are fuzzy, so as we ran down the road, and it got to be a few more minutes without a marker than were comfortable, the thought occurred to us that we might have been going the wrong way.  But I spotted an orange flag, so we continued up the road, and eventually, we found a double-orange flag that signaled the trail turn-off.  We climbed the winding, technical trail, only to discover, in horror, three runners coming TOWARDS us . . . they had thought they were the leaders, because they were breaking cobwebs.  Oliver was confused, but I immediately realized that, since there were no arrows on the ground, we had mistakenly entered the loop where we were supposed to exit, and were now running the loop backwards.  Panic set in - would we have to re-run the loop?

In any case, it made sense to finish out the loop, since if we had to re-run it, we would have to go back to where we got off course (which was the entrance to the loop).  After lots of reassuring oncoming runners that they were going the right way, we made it back to Boyer, where Ray, the race director, was sitting on his truck, directing us left.  Oliver talked to him, and he let us continue, since we had run the same distance, and correctly followed the ambiguous directions (we were technically not wrong, since there were no arrows indicating the direction of the loop; there were, however, arrows throughout the rest of the course, painted on the ground).  I imagine that they will paint arrows on the ground on this part of the course next year.

At any rate, with that minor catastrophe resolved, we ran together to the first crew stop, where Chris was waiting for me.  My bottles were empty, and somehow, my drop bag hadn't made it there - minor catastrophe #2.  Fortunately, Chris Wilde, a runner from Baltimore who was crewing another runner, had a jug of blue Gatorade that he was willing to share, so I was able to leave the aid station with one bottle of Gatorade, and one bottle of gross Succeed drink (which I eventually dumped).  Half a banana and some Coke later, I was heading down the road.

For the next 13 or so miles of road, Oliver and I ran closely together.  Sometimes he would get ahead, and then I would catch up (at one point, he ran off the road, distracted by extraneous orange flags on somebody's property, which led him partway up a grassy hill), but he was starting to put distance on my by pretty much blowing through the aid stations, while I was taking a minute or so to drink a Coke and/or eat a few banana chunks.  I was feeling good on this fueling strategy, and reasoned that he couldn't possibly keep skipping the aid without crashing.  Plus, this was apparently his first 100-mile race (or so he said, in some sort of accent), and he was running with me because he was "crazy."

As I neared Four Points, at around 33 miles, Oliver had pulled out of sight, and now, entering one of the more difficult sections of the race, I had to decide how hard to push.  Ultimately, I decided that with about 2/3rds of the race left to run, it would probably be better to run a little conservatively, in the hopes that Oliver would blow up.  I ran so conservatively here, in fact, that the third-place runner, Mike Mason, briefly caught and passed me at around mile 44, on the gravel road back to Four Points.  Fortunately, I gambled that he was running too hard too early, and that the tougher stuff ahead (particularly the ATV trail) would get the best of him, and I won that round . . . eventually, coming downhill on the ATV trail, I passed him.  But on the return to Four Points, Carter (who had taped my bleeding nipples on the way out) commented that I had slowed down, and seemed concerned (although I wasn't too concerned), and nobody was talking about where the leader was, so I got the feeling that people were thinking that he was totally out of reach.

And so it went for the rest of the race.  I stuck with my Gatorade/Coke/bananas fueling strategy, and kept plugging along - the temperatures never got much about 75 degrees, and with the shade and the breeze, the conditions were very forgiving (which may have inadvertently made Oliver's race strategy a good one - going out too hard in the typical Old Dominion heat tends to be a recipe for disaster).  I felt pretty good the whole way, but I never had any indication of how far ahead Oliver was, and, in retrospect, maybe I should have asked.  Because by the time curiosity got the better of me (just past mile 90), it turned out that he was about 15 minutes ahead - apparently I had been shrinking his half-hour gap for a while.  I charged as hard as I could in the last 9 miles, but it was too little, too late - in town, with about a mile and a half to go, I saw the lead Jeep coming at me, and I knew that he had finished.  So I slowed down and pretty much walked the rest of the race, costing me about 15 minutes on my finishing time, but since I was solidly in second place, I wasn't terribly concerned (room for improvement next year, right?)

Chris and Henry were the only people waiting for me at the still-darkening finish line.  Chris took pictures of me (I'm sure my nipple-bleed looked great), and Henry recorded my time:

Old-school Old Dominion Results Sheet

17 hours, 46 minutes, 58 seconds later, I was finished, and shortly afterwards, I was on the road back to Baltimore.  The intermission between races at my girlfriend's apartment is worth mentioning:  I drove back in the clothes that I wore during the race, nipple-bleed on my shirt, number still pinned to my shorts.  She lives just up the street from a club in downtown Baltimore, so on a Saturday night, parking is scarce, and I was forced to park about three blocks away from her apartment. Just as I was parking, the police arrived and began clearing the club, due to some sort of physical altercation on the premises, so I was walking towards a parade of evacuated clubgoers in my gross running clothes.  You would think that the first thing somebody would have commented on was my nipple bleed, but it was actually the second - the first comment was from a guy who said "dang, you been running?"  I smiled and said, "yeah, a little bit."  But the height of this experience was when two police officers stopped me a block away from my destination and said "are your nipples bleeding, sir?"  I explained that I had been running and that it was no big deal, and once they were satisfied that I was not injured in the club brawl, they let me go.  (And things like this are why I do things like that.)

And . . . on to Act 2, the Bel Air Town Run.  Last year, I was pretty much crippled, and it took me over 25 minutes to finish the run, but the important thing was the finish.  This year, I finished Old Dominion nearly 2 hours faster, and felt better after the race, so I figured I could at least go slightly faster than last year.  I had a nice little "reunion" prior to the race with my family (all of whom came out to watch), and some friends from high school (Pete DeCapite and Patrick Early), which helped me feel a little less terrible about three more miles under these conditions.

The weather remained cooperative, though, and I optimistically lined up near the front of the pack, to discover that once the race started, my legs loosened up, and I was running reasonably fast (albeit not entirely comfortably).  I went through the first (downhill? short?) mile in 6:58, according to the clock on the course, and was not feeling as though I had totally spent myself, so I just went with it, kept passing the people in front of me, and, in what seemed like a comically short amount of time after 17+ hours of rugged trail running, I was at the finish line, 21 minutes and 47 seconds later:

Snuck through the crowd and snapped a picture of the results.

The "after-party" at the Town Run was better still - it seemed like everywhere I turned, somebody I knew was there hanging out, wanting to talk about running (including Brien Christesen, another friend from high school, with his wife and children). It was sort of surreal, since so many years have passed since high school, but being back there, where the Town Run has been every year, made things feel, in an odd way, like they hadn't changed at all.

And speaking of "not changing," we all waited patiently through the traditional long age-group awards, and then the more-to-the-point overall awards for the bike raffle, and, for the 17th consecutive year, I did not win the bike.  Oh well, better luck next year.  Then it was back to my parents' house for shower, food, and a ride to the airport, so I can spend two weeks at Fort Leavenworth learning about . . . um, something, I forget.  I hope there are good places to run here!

All in all, a satisfying weekend of upholding running traditions, making new memories, and, in some cases, squeezing Hi-C boxes into empty gallon jugs of water.  And I don't feel cripplingly bad . . . maybe I'll continue a tradition, and go running again today. :)

Week in Review: 25-31 March, and Umstead 100 Epic Fail Report

Getting the numbers out of the way:

25 March: 15 miles, half with Jesper (see previous blog post - 120 minutes)

26 March: 7 miles at APG, some faster parts in there (down to 6:30-ish/mile - 50 minutes total)

27 March: 1 easy mile (10 minutes) - sick

28 March: 1 easy mile (10 minutes) - sick sick

29 March: 1 easy mile (10 minutes) - sick sick sick

30 March: 3 unintentional miles (30 minutes), searching for my misplaced car (which ended up getting towed right before my eyes)

31 March: 83 miles (1080 minutes), or, in more human-readable form, the first 83 miles of the Umstead 100, in 18 hours

Total time: 1310 minutes
Total distance: 111 miles

And now, what you really came here for: the race report.

My Umstead 100 failure is, even a day later, still a difficult thing to pick apart, let alone digest (especially with the knives-of-fire feeling in my stomach continuing as I type this), but, since "I always try my best" has become my mantra lately, here goes:

Coming into this race, I was not exactly feeling my best. In addition to being sick for most of the week leading up to the race (which, due to a hectic schedule at work, was improving on a very slow timeline - one day of complete rest would have totally knocked it out; instead, I had to settle for 3+ days of gradual recovery), the morning of the race, my car was towed (story for another day), and I had to get it back from the impound lot before I could even begin my drive down there.

Still, I suppose it could have been worse. As recently as Thursday night before the race, I couldn't take a full breath without chest pain, so it was a relief on Friday to finally be able to breathe fully for the first time in a week. And Serge Arbona, an ultrarunner from the Baltimore area who has won Umstead a few times, had his car break down on him on the drive down - fortunately, not too far from the race, so Mark, Johnny, and Katie were able to drive out and pick him up (and Johnny was going back to Baltimore after the race, so Serge had a ride home), but the car wasn't coming with him.

So with a "nothing is perfect, so let's just work with what I have and see what happens" attitude, I arrived at the (entirely too-long) pre-race briefing on Friday, and totally unintentionally, found myself sitting underneath the poster listing the top times on the 100-mile course (no pressure). After the briefing, I found Mark Manz (who I was staying with, whose recent training mileage and race performances have been pretty much flawless, at increasing distances, and who lives just a few miles away from the course, and trains on it all the time - again, no pressure) and company, and it was off to dinner, Target, and bed, perhaps wasting a little too much time (but having a lot of fun) in the process.

I slept pretty well on the floor in Mark's apartment (Serge apparently slept on a board in the woods, much to Christian's chagrin, so I think that sleeping in hard, uncomfortable places is pretty much as critical to being a champion ultrarunner as eating pizza and Nutella), and woke up without too much foot-dragging at 4 a.m. on Saturday morning, with everybody else. Maybe I woke up more easily than usual because I was vaguely excited about what I was about to do.

I don't think I ate much of a breakfast, but I also didn't feel very hungry. Not having to drive to the race was a luxury (Johnny did the honors). We got there in plenty of time, and baffling ordeal in the start/finish lodge aside (we were told to "just set your drop bags anywhere near the back of the room," a direction which would later become problematic), it was a very comfortable way to begin an experience that would become very uncomfortable . . .


<3 . . . minutes before the start of the race. (not an S&M club, as somebody later suggested)

The Umstead 100 is 8 laps, 12.5 miles per lap, on a "crushed gravel" surface, which is so packed down at this point that it's basically a road (think NCR Trail with hills, for Baltimore people). The gain/loss is 1000 feet per loop, or 8000 feet total, so while it's not flat, it's not unmanageable, either, as none of the gain or loss is steep enough to truly force a walk. So this is basically a very fast course, and it was my hope that I could at least run sub-16-hours here and set a new 100-mile PR.

And then here's what happened, lap-by-lap:

Lap 1: 1 hour, 36 minutes. Just a little bit fast, due to the typical "everybody goes out fast in a race, no matter what distance the race is" energy. But after Mike Morton decided to go way ahead of everybody and run 6:30/mile, I decided that it was stupid to chase that, settled in, and soon, I was consistently hitting 8 minutes per mile, right on target, even with the hills. Since I was running shirtless, the light rain kept me cool and comfortable, and the pace felt manageable. Some stomach pain was creeping in, but nothing to be terribly alarmed about (or so I thought).

Lap 2: 1 hour, 40 minutes. The most uneventful lap. Now really locked in on my pace (considering that 1 hour, 40 minutes per lap equates to a 13:20 finishing time), I was, at least temporarily, enjoying this rolling run through what turned out to be, now that daylight was in full (albeit cloudy) effect, a really pretty park. The hills were actually a welcome break, as they allowed me to switch up the pace a bit, and also helped to mentally break up the course into smaller sections. In spite of my solid lap, people who were insistent on going out stupid-fast were actually gaining on me and passing me. This was a little bit demoralizing, but considering the kind of pace I was on, I was content to just let this go, even when one runner commented about how fast Morton went out, and how nobody was going to catch him. (I responded that if Morton can run 6:30/pace for 100 miles, more power to him, but I doubt that he can, and it doesn't matter anyway, because his race has nothing to do with what we're doing here.) I was also trying to be content to let my stomach pain go, but this would prove to be a mistake . . .

Lap 3: 2 hours, 2 minutes. Here was where things started to go wrong. No longer able to ignore my mounting stomach problems (which I suspect were a result of the cold not having entirely cleared my system - I have a history of sinus residue causing my stomach to be very upset), I stopped for a bathroom break twice on this loop, costing me about 10 minutes (and Mark passed me during my first bathroom stop, just past mile 3 of this loop - another mental blow). The other 10 minutes off-pace was due to deliberate slowing to try to contain my stomach problems. Unfortunately, the problems were also getting to my legs, and I was starting to get those involuntary twitches - the ones you get when you're behind on fluids/electrolytes. Between being sick, and the continuing light rain keeping everything cool, I had apparently been losing water and salts more quickly than I thought, or than what would be typical for me under these conditions. Now the best I could do was try to drink more, take more electrolyte tablets, and hope that they would absorb in time to bring things back to where they were at the beginning of the race, when everything felt better . . . But things were clearly trending in the wrong direction. Even sort of randomly seeing Sniper and Jon at the start/finish probably wouldn't be enough to fix this . . .

Lap 4: 2 hours, 32 minutes. And, now the wheels fall off the cart. Full-on "knives-of-fire" feeling in my stomach with even the slightest exertion (random, stabbing pain), and pretty soon, those knives were stabbing my quads, too. I continued my "slow down and hope the race comes back to you" strategy, but it really wasn't working. I started walking a lot (including with Toni and friends for a bit - which was nice, because misery loves company). The thoughts of just giving up at 50 miles (since they give you credit for finishing the 50-mile race if you finish the first half of the 100-mile race) were getting louder and sounding more sensible, considering the death march that this was turning into. And then, just when I felt like my race was trashed, and I stopped to take this picture, just past the 8-mile mark:



. . . who should come flying past me, lapping me, but Superman himself: Mike Morton, and a woman who was apparently pacing him. Because it had felt like too long since I had run, and, what the heck, why not, I decided to chase him down the hill. And, surprise, I caught him fairly easily, and passed him. But then the road went uphill, and, figuring that he was going to run, I decided I would also run up the hill. To my surprise, I was actually gaining distance on him going up the hill. I overheard his pacer say something about "guy in the red shorts," and I quickly got the sense that she was not happy that I had passed him (even though he was just about a lap ahead at this point). So, with some egging on, on the next uphill, he passed me . . . only to slow to a walk once he had about 50 feet in front of me. Ridiculous. So I power-walked to close the distance a bit, then resumed running and passed him again.

This game continued for the remainder of the lap - passing him, getting passed again on a hill, at which point he would slow to a walk, and I would speed up and pass him again. On the fourth pass, I heard his pacer, exasperated, shout "oh my God!" . . . which led me to believe that his pacer was pushing him to do this, since he didn't look at me or say anything to me while this was happening. After this pass, I kept my slight lead on him all the way through to the end of the loop, at which point I arbitrarily decided not to play the game anymore - I had held off being lapped for 50 miles, a nice round number, where I was going to "quit" anyway. Mike kept going, of course, dropping his pacer and not acknowledging anybody at the start/finish.

EDIT: Mike Morton later sent me a Facebook message to clarify that his pacer was not exasperated, but instead impressed by my effort. And Mike, for his part, was just racing, as fast as he could. So no hard feelings here - just a thing that happened. :)

Lap 5: 3 hours, 25 minutes - yep, problems. Although, in retrospect, most of the time that I wasted on this lap was at the "airport loop" turnaround. About a mile and a half into the loop (during which Serge and his pacer, Christian, encouraged me to run with them, but suddenly, the knives of fire in my legs were back again, and I took two horrifically painful steps and decided that it wasn't happening, although I appreciated the thought), there was a turnaround point . . . with chairs. I sat down, at about the 52-mile mark, and just watched people come past the turnaround for the next hour. Fast, slow, running, walking, whatever - I sat there, drinking sweet tea and taking electrolyte pills and just hoping that my legs would stop twitching involuntarily. Eventually, when the twitching had somewhat subsided, I decided to get up and start walking, and for a little while, I walked with Meredith, until I stopped to go to the bathroom, they walked ahead, and then I had to run to catch them, at which point, I decided to just keep running, and wound up finishing the loop in a somewhat reasonable time . . .

Lap 6: 2 hours, 58 minutes. And then, crash again. After what seemed like a momentum gain (albeit a slower one than the one from Lap 4 into Lap 5), starting on my sixth lap, things started feeling terrible again. At this point, I was near Tony Portera during the airport loop section of the course, and we stuck together for a little while, until he ran off, looking and apparently feeling a lot better than I did at that point (he would go on to finish in 19 hours and change - awesome run for him). I walked most of the way to the far-side aid station (at mile 7), then mounted a brief charge, then crashed again, then reached the unmanned aid tent at a little over 11 miles into the loop (or about a mile and a half to go), when I crossed paths with Mark, on his way to a finish of just over 14 hours (third place, just two minutes behind second). Somehow, I managed to run in with him, and to look and feel totally fine doing it, even though we were more or less finishing-sprinting at that point (low-to-mid 7-minute-mile pace). I congratulated him, and then told him that he could leave (advice which he did not take to heart). After some confusion (which involved being offered three other headlamps), I found my headlamp, then headed out for my 7th lap, hoping the momentum would carry through . . .

Lap 7: 4 hours, 50 minutes. But unfortunately, not so. After another mile or two of running, the stabbing pain was back, reducing me to a walk again. Fortunately, sort of out of the blue, I got a text message from Meg D early in the lap, and our subsequent text banter at this critical juncture in the race kept me from giving up the ghost. And when I say "critical," I mean that this last little bit of running had sent my body into such a deep downward spiral that even walking almost the entire way to the far-end aid station, once I got there, my legs were twitching, my stomach was protesting, and my body was on the verge of near-collapse. So I went into triage mode, and ate some potato soup and whatever else would go down, and slept on a cot for a little over an hour. When I woke up and went to stand up, the pain of the first few steps was pretty close to unbearable. But after a few more steps, it became apparent that walking was a possibility; running, however, would not be. I continued my long walk to the end of the lap, just as it began to thunderstorm. Perfect.

Lap 8: 3 hours, 39 minutes. And speaking of storm, I had pretty much had it at the start of this lap. At no point did anybody ever organize the drop bags (rendering mine somewhat useless), so, in frustration, I walked into the cabin, straight to the back where my drop bag was, stumbling over dozens of walking wounded and strap-hangers otherwise, grabbed my iPod shuffle out of the bag, and walked out, ignoring everybody who was offering to "help" me. I felt bad about storming off like this, and later apologized to people, but at this point, there was nothing anybody could do. I had a little under 5 hours left to make the sub-24-hour cutoff, and while I had thought at the end of lap 6 that maybe I could rally and finish the last two laps in 4 or 5 hours, apparently, this was not going to happen, and the best I could do was to just steadily walk to the finish, so as not to risk another crash like the last one that happened on the 7th lap, and risk not finishing under 24 hours. I texted Mark and crew and told them emphatically to go home, since they had actually stayed around during my last lap (my slowest of the entire race) - I felt bad that I hadn't been more adamant about this point sooner. With my music blasting (Lady Gaga, Rage Against the Machine, and Andrew WK, mostly), I did my best power-walk-to-the finish that I could (which I knew that I could do, since this was about the distance of the climb up Mount Whitney at the end of Badwater, and I've done that twice now, both times in less-than-idea physical states). And after a few hours of walking in the dark, passing other people walking, and only being passed by one other person, in spite of the fact that I walked the ENTIRE lap, I was finally walking up the steps to the finish line . . . and I tripped a little and stubbed my left big toe on the third-to-last step, letting out a very loud expletive as I registered my only black toenail from the race . . . which pretty much summed up my experience right there.

22 hours, 46 minutes, and 12 seconds later, this catastrophe came to a close. I got my belt buckle and my split sheet:


(plus a penny that I found on the porch of the lodge as I walked in right after the race - one more for the Speedgoat 50K jar . . .)

And then I flopped down in a cot in the cabin and slept for five hours. I woke up feeling sore, but not miserably so, and I spent a few more hours socializing with Serge (who ended up dropping out at mile 85 because he was throwing up uncontrollably), Christian, and whoever else happened to be wandering by the start/finish. Eventually Mark and crew showed up, and after a brief attempt to sort out the headlamp fiasco (since the drop bags were disorganized, when I came in from my sixth lap, it took a while for somebody to find my headlamp, and, in the meantime, I was offered three other headlamps, and somehow, Johnny lost his headlamp in the process . . . we never did find it), we went our separate ways - I had lunch with Mark, Katie, and Zane, and we had a good laugh over all of this (and other things), and then I began the long drive home, stopping at the 930 Club in DC for the Andrew WK show (which was pretty awesome - party till you puke, indeed).

So none of this was very pretty. And, to be very honest, the last two laps felt really pointless to me, since it was clear that I wasn't going to meet any sort of time goal of meaning, other than sub-24, and I didn't feel as though I had anything to prove by finishing. But at the same time, with so many people pulling for me to finish, I felt as though I owed everybody my best effort, and that's what I gave. Unfortunately, that day, it wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be.

And now that I have a little bit of distance on the situation, I can appreciate the positive aspects of it a little more. Since I was going slower than I typically would have, I had a lot more opportunity to socialize with the other runners when I was working through my low points, and that was something different and fun. The course is actually a lovely place for a walk, so of all the places where I could be forced to deathmarch, this was one of the least-bad places (with the MMT 100 being near the top of the "awful" scale in this regard). And I am really grateful for all of the people who supported me throughout the race, both at the race and from afar.

And in an even broader sense, considering how sick I was before the race, I made it out alive, without making myself sicker, and without injuring myself, so that I can continue to train through this. In fact (huge confession here), this was the first run of any substantial distance in about five years where I didn't have nagging knee pain afterwards. I tend to have somewhat loose joints, and my knees tend to get a little swollen and irritated from running, so in the past couple of weeks, I've made a few minor changes to my stride to correct this problem. In the long-term, the fact that I was so successful in doing this, and that it held up over a variety of speeds, from slow trudge to fast run, over 100 miles, is a huge confidence boost that I'm on the right track. But in the interim, there are muscles to re-train, and this might have been a contributing factor to that "knives of fire" feeling in my quads. (Although I still think that the lingering sickness was the main problem here.)

So once again, and now more than ever, a huge thank you to everybody who supported me during this race, and congratulations to everybody who finished. (And a special huge congratulations to Mark Manz, who ran 14 hours, 16 minutes and change in his first 100 - amazing stuff. Not to mention he let me crash at his place, and, outside of the race itself, we had a fun weekend together.) Yeah, maybe I'm sounding like a broken record with this lately, but I really do enjoy the fact that because of everybody's support, all of this "crazy" stuff that I do takes on a life and a meaning that's bigger than just a bunch of wackos running around in the woods all day. And I've got more than a few big running events planned in the months ahead, so stay tuned - this one was just a speedbump on the road to awesomeness. :)

The Eagle Has Landed: Eagle 100-Mile Endurance Run Preview

For what will probably be my last major "adventure" of 2011, this Saturday (December 17th), starting at 5 a.m., I'll be running an all-new 100-mile race, mapped, organized, and directed by Dave Snipes, with a modest amount of input from me. This course takes parts of The Ring, the Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run, the Massanutten Mountain Trails 100-Mile Run, and some fun new surprises (some of which I am forbidden from posting pictures of here), and remixes them all at the very end of the year, far away from all of those races, to present what will hopefully be an exciting new challenge for runners and the foolhardy alike.

This will be a limited-entry pilot test of this course, and if it turns out awesome, who knows how high this eagle will fly next year. But for now, here are a few preview pictures from the course-marking expedition that I participated in a couple of weeks ago . . . Enjoy!


The first image in this blog entry because it's arguably the coolest, but in the race, it's the last thing you'll see . . .


Rocks coming down . . .


Rocks going up.


If you can't see the course markings, you probably shouldn't run this race.


Look familiar?

Week in Review: 6 November - 12 November, and Double-Richmond Marathon Run Report

Okay, let's do the darn thing:

6 November - 34-ish miles (370 minutes), counting being lost at Fire on the Mountain; we went over this

7 November - 2 miles, in my button-down shirt, khakis, and Steve Madden dress shoes; 1 to lunch in 6:17, 1 back in 5:53

8 November - 3 miles easy at lunch (30 minutes), 7 miles at TNT, including 2x800m (3:04, 2:51), 2x400m (79, 79), and 4x200m (37, 35, 34, 34), 2 miles warmup, 3 miles warmdown (45 minutes)

9 November - 3 miles easy at lunch (30 minutes)

10 November - 10 miles fast-ish at lunch (65 minutes)

11 November - 2 miles easy, around Patterson Park (20 minutes)

12 November - Starting at 2:15 a.m., Reverse Richmond Marathon in 4:40, followed by Regular Richmond Marathon in 3:46; 52.4 miles

Total Time: 1075 minutes
Total Distance: 113 miles

And now, somewhat belatedly, but before this coming weekend's adventures push last weekend's too far into the back of my mind to write this, the Double-Richmond (what does this mean?) Marathon Report . . .

To say that I was a little bit nervous about attempting this would be an understatement. Richmond just sort of "happened" for me, in that I was contacted to pace the 3:10 marathon group, as a result of my prior pacing exploits, and Dave Snipes has a tradition of running the Richmond Marathon from finish to start, starting at around 2 a.m. on marathon day, then changing clothes and running the official marathon. Glue those two together, and you get a challenging, vaguely risky endeavor . . . right up my alley.

Theoretically, it seemed doable - Sniper was planning on running around 4:30 for the "reverse" marathon, so it would be a total of 7:40 for 52.4 miles, which is more or less in the ballpark of my 50-mile PR set this past spring at Bull Run. But there was also the drastic difference in pace (non-stop 10-ish minute miles down to non-stop 7-ish minute miles), the early start time (and associated minimal sleep), the weather (a little below freezing overnight), and the general unfamiliarity of all of this to consider.

All of that aside, I set out for this ridiculousness at around 3 p.m. on Friday afternoon, and by the time the traffic (which made the drive closer to 4 hours, as opposed to the 3 hours it was supposed to be), the expo (pleasantly low-key), dinner (pizza at a local place with Sniper), and parking near the finish (on a street fittingly "just south of Grace (Street)") were behind me, it was nearly 11 p.m., leaving me with less than 3 hours to sleep. Sniper woke me with a phone call at 1:30 a.m., and not long after, I found myself stumbling onto the streets, dressed in multiple layers, top and bottom, clutching my water bottle for dear life.

I met Sniper and another friend and we walked to the finish line, chattering away pleasantly, as if it were totally normal to be out like this on the nearly-deserted, starkly-lit city streets. As we unceremoniously began our run, we passed a crowd of sloppy drunks, who, it briefly occurred to me, might have more sense in them than we did at this point.

But my reluctance gradually faded as we settled into a comfortable pace, and Sniper settled into "tour mode," telling us all about details of the course that, in the dark, were sometimes barely visible. The most amusing of these was the Dollar Tree, which Sniper pointed out as we got closer, only to have our other friend point out that somebody had apparently crashed a car into it, breaking down the center panel in front of the store, and, judging from the debris on the ground, had made off with a ton of iPhone cases.

Aside from the cold and the dark, both of which became more managable following a port-a-pot break around 4 miles in (thankfully, these were all over the course), trotting along through the streets at an odd hour of the night was peaceful, even pleasant. Thanks to the cold, I didn't have to drink as much as I usually would, and I was perfectly comfortable subsisting on Gu Chomps which I kept in my pants pocket in a reasonably successful attempt to keep them warm and edible.

At around 10 miles in, another friend jumped in to run the last 16 miles with us, and at this point, the course (which I hadn't seen up to this point) got significantly more scenic. About a mile later, we crossed a bridge with a view like this:


Richmond apparently has a skyline; see above.

Eventually, this gave way to neighborhoods, and then a dark, rolling section near the water, before we headed back into downtown again. As we came closer to the start, and past 6 a.m., nearing 7 a.m., the sky became lighter and somehow, it seemed as if we hadn't spend the past 4+ hours running at all. We passed the Dollar Tree again, and, now camera-equipped, we got a shot of it in its now half-repaired state:


The Dollar Tree, in some sort of glory.

We jogged towards the finish, talking about nothing and playing chicken with the faster runners striding out before the start of the 8K. With as little ceremony as we had when we started, we crossed the start line (our finish line), and weaved our way into the crowd.

Now, at almost 7 a.m., I had about 15 minutes to use the port-a-pot, change clothes (and put on my multi-bibbed pacer shirt), and get to the hotel where the pacers were meeting. Wearing different shoes (Asics 2150s - the blue and white ones - for the reverse, my trusty blue-and-yellow Nike Run Avants for the official) and less clothing (long-sleeved undershirt layer, and gloves, but just shorts without pants on top, and a baseball cap in place of my skull cap), I jogged to the hotel, where, fortunately, I was on-time enough to spend some time making small talk with a friend of mine, who was pacing the 3:05 group. A little small talk actually made me feel a lot better about what I was going to do.

I picked up my 3:10 sign, used the port-a-pot one more time, and headed for the starting line. Of course, now that the Boston qualifier is 3:05, 3:10 isn't what it used to be, so a lot of people were asking me where the 3:00 and 3:05 groups were. But my loyal core of 3:10 runners and I headed out together, and, despite my worries, and the temporary panic that we had gone well under pace until somebody noted that the 1-mile sign that we saw was for the 8K, we passed the first mile in 7:09 - remarkably close to pace, and with little feeling of fatigue.

And so it went, splitting a little under 7:15, and not feeling the worse for wear, for the first 10 or 11 miles. I think the pace group coordinator, who saw me at around mile 7, was surprised that I looked so comfortable, considering that I had been up most of the night running in the cold. And the weather was getting warmer (almost a bad thing, given all of my layers - in retrospect, I could have worn less and been okay), and for a while, I thought I was going to pull it off.

Then, around the halfway point, things started getting more difficult. Maybe it was the rolling hills, or maybe just being up for so long, but for whatever reason, I was struggling to hold on to pace. I gave back nearly a minute of cushion between miles 11 and 13.1, splitting the half at right around 1:35. I bravely held on for as long as I could, but at around mile 16, when the 3:15 group passed me, I stepped off the course (and into a much-needed port-a-pot) at 1:56 and change into the race. Still technically on pace, but not feeling like I could continue.

And then my body decided to subject me to every version of difficulty that I've ever had in a race. About five minutes later, I was back on the course, walking through the aid station, feeling spent. I tried to run, but the pain in my legs was reminiscent of what I had felt at Fire on the Mountain the prior weekend (oh right, speaking of reasons to be nervous about this whole thing . . . ), and I did my best to slow down to make it manageable, but eventually, only a walk was manageable.

In about fifteen minutes, my body started to come around, but then I started feeling weak - the same feeling I had at the end of Holiday Lake, when I out-ran my nutrition and staggered through the last two miles. Knowing how bad this could have gotten, I made sure to eat plenty at the next aid station, and, gradually easing back into running, I managed to avert this crisis.

Now all that was left was the pain, and to struggle through this, I kept recalling scenes from "Surviving the Cut," when the drill sergeant is yelling at the recruits, telling them that they are weak, and to "stop feeling sorry for yourself!" and sometimes, "what are you doing? if this was for real, you would have gotten somebody killed!" Strangely, this seemed to work, and, as I approached the last 5K, I started picking it up again, running the last 3.2 miles in about 25 minutes - not blazing-fast, but much improved from walking not so long ago. I hauled down the last hills into the finish, and, 3 hours, 46 minutes, and 17 seconds later, I could breathe a sigh of relief. It was finished.

So, overall, about 36 minutes slower than I would have liked, which was disappointing, and a large part of why it took me this long to write about this. But, on the other hand, I was closer to the goal than it appears. In retrospect, my nutrition during the reverse run was good enough for that run, but not the run to come. I essentially ran out of gas for the pace that I was trying to run, and it might have helped to eat more at the aid stations during the official marathon, in spite of the water slosh in the stomach (gels maybe, and less water, because it wasn't particularly hot).

Still, I'd consider it progress, and a solid training run for Hellgate (which, if you haven't guessed, is the next big race for me), thanks to the timing, temperature, and distance involved. One more big weekend like this, and then it'll be back to focusing on the daily run until midnight on December 10th . . .