30 October - 17 miles (120 minutes), sort of fast, around the usual Baltimore Inner Harbor haunts
31 October - 1 mile (10 minutes), feeling lethargic
1 November - 1 mile (10 minutes), still feeling lethargic
2 November - 1 mile (10 minutes), feeling like this lethargy needs to end
3 November - 6 miles (45 minutes) - that's more like it. Patterson Park, and such.
4 November - 10 miles (75 minutes), Loch Raven, where somebody called me "Nadal" . . . it's everywhere
5 November - 7 miles (50 minutes), Inner Harbor and whatever, cold morning warm-up for the next day's race
Total Time: 320 minutes
Total Distance: 43 miles
Clearly, sort of a crummy week. In retrospect, the 17-mile run on Sunday was a depleted run, run to exhaustion, and took me perhaps too long to recover from, as we will see . . .
And now, the race report:
The Fire on the Mountain battle began long before the horn went off. It began at exactly 2:47 a.m., when I woke up, without the aid of my cell phone alarm, and immediately began to dread the day ahead. Not that this is necessarily uncommon when I race; I can't even count the number of races (good ones, even) where I felt like dropping out in the first mile. But this kind of trepidation, this early in the game, was particularly nerve-wracking. In general, this was an all-sorts-of-out-of-sorts day, with this not even supposed to be Fire on the Mountain day (it was postponed from last Sunday, due to snow), daylight savings time meaning that 2:47 a.m. was really 3:47 a.m. (although, thanks to a very early bedtime, sleep-wise, this felt like 6:47 a.m.), and the fact that there were several other races this weekend that were of interest to me, all of which I had to forego to run this race. At least a dozen times on the dark, desolate drive out to Flintstone, I thought about turning around and going home, right then and there. (The problem, of course, was that every time I thought of it and didn't do it, I was a little further from home, making that decision just a bit more impractical.) My Vans Warped Tour 2011 CD kept me awake and company until I finally stopped to use the restroom at the Sideling Hill rest stop, and, having gotten out of the car and walked around a bit, now felt a little more human. Still not great, but slightly more invested in the race.
The check-in at the finish, in a random field somewhere, and the bus ride to the start, were pretty uneventful. The view from Lookout Mountain is worth noting:
As close to heaven as this is going to get . . .
The race director told us that the course was marked "as good as it was going to be" and that if we had a question, we should "find somebody who ran it last year." And, with those words of encouragement, we were off on our ridiculous adventure . . .
And it was apparent from the start that this was going to be a roller-coaster day. Not just the course, which, in the span of the first two miles, consisted of a very steep uphill on a road, an even steeper downhill on a road, and then a quick turn-off onto a narrow, rocky, leaf-covered single-track trail that dove further down the hill. But as I navigated this nonsense, somewhere in the top 10, every bit of my body was protesting. First my left quad hurt. I managed to shift the pain away, and then it was my right shin. And then above my left knee. And then above my right knee. The uneven terrain and nearly non-existent trail (thanks to the leaf cover, downed trees, and excess water) was not helping at all. I maintained position until around 3.5 miles, when I managed to run off course about half a mile, taking five other people with me. Turned out that there was a turn-off that we had missed, because although it was marked with a surveyor flag, the trail straight ahead was wide, while the left turn up the hill was narrow and unappealing.
Back on course, we all slogged up the hill, but now there was no way to tell what position we were in, since, this early in the race, a 10-minute detour is enough to put you all the way in the back of the pack. The random pains continued, and while I thought vaguely of dropping out, I also felt committed enough to this, particularly since this was what I was doing in lieu of several other things, that I wasn't going to do it.
As it turned out, I was soon cursing the fact that I had not given dropping more serious consideration, as the next segment of red trail, following a brief reprive on a logging road, was even more leaf-covered, less defined, and on the side of a steep hill, to boot. One missed step would send you tumbling to, well, let's not get that morbid right here. It was at this point that the pain from the laces on my Hokas (yes, I had hoped the heel slippage would resolve itself, but in spite of multiple efforts to lace them differently) started becoming a significant nuisance. The digging into the front of my foot was making navigation on the uneven terrain a more painful challenge than it should have been, and just when I thought I had made peace with that, here came the stream crossings . . .
I am not exaggerating when I say that there were at least a dozen stream crossings. Maybe a dozen is too conservative. But for whatever reason, the trail wound snake-like across the stream bed, over and over again. It later turned out that because of all of the snow, this was a particularly wet year, and, last year, this section of the course was bone-dry. As it was still around 30 degrees, being forced to get wet, in some cases, up to your knees, was unpleasant. I foolishly tried to tiptoe around, and minimize the drenching, but on the third or fourth stream crossing, I slipped on a rock and fell in. Completely soaked, including through two layers of gloves, I spent the remainder of this trail section hoping that the sun would come out and dry my gloves. Somewhere along here, the numbness in my feet caused me to roll my right ankle at least three times. Perfect. And we weren't even 10 miles in . . .
Red turned to green, but the scene remained the same. Rocks, roots, water, stream crossings, fallen trees, over, and over, and over again. At least the sun was starting to come out, but the random pain all over, and the specific lace pain in my shoes, was wearing on me. Somehow, I managed to hold it together enough not to trip, and, as we approached the halfway point, navigating through the "green region" (which the "trails" shall henceforth be known as), got easier, and I passed the three people who were hanging with me through the wet, nasty, technical bits. I reached the "midpoint" (who really knows where it is) at around 3 hours and 20 minutes, obviously really slow, but at the same time, I didn't feel all that bad about this (which maybe, in and of itself, was bad).
Now for the "easy" logging road section. And although people complained about this last year, I have to admit, it was fairly easy. There were a few rolling hills, but overall, this was where things started to turn around for me. The sun was out, my clothes were drying, and, in spite of all of the pain, I was starting to find a rhythm (albeit an uncomfortable one), and I passed four more people on this section. This was in spite of having to re-tie my shoes twice, finally reaching a still uneasy compromise with the painful Hoka lacing system.
But eventually, easy gave way to the purple woods region, where we went back to leafy, rocky, vaguely marked trail. In spite of sore feet from my lace issue and rolling my ankle early on, I finally fell into a rhythm here. I wasn't moving all that fast all the time, particularly down the really rocky downhills, but I was averaging around 10-minute miles overall. The pain hadn't really stopped shifting randomly, or gone away, but I was finally dealing with it. As I climbed the last hill, to gunshots in the distance . . .
Firing on the Mountain (courtesy of Mark Rodriguez)
. . . having passed four more people in this section, part of me was actually disappointed that now that I was making some kind of decent progress, the race was over. (The smarter part of me realized that this had been a bad day, and it was probably best to cut my losses here.) I took a log from a volunteer, ran the last loop around the field, and dropped the log into the fire to finish the race.
The (arguably weak) fire . . . maybe if all 120 registered runners had showed up, it would have been more impressive . . .
Overall, I'm still not totally sure what to make of the race. I clearly had a terrible start, but ended up finishing in a little over 6 hours, which means that the last half took me somewhere between 2 hours and 40 minutes and 2 hours and 50 minutes - a little closer to what I wanted to do for the entire race, and, especially if I had counted only the last section, probably on pace for a "good" time given the conditions. Over the course of the race, in spite of increasing foot/ankle pain (which disappeared, even the ankle sprain pain, as soon as I took off the damn Hokas - back to the drawing board with those . . .), I managed to adapt and slog through it, so I must not be totally burned-out for the year. If anything, I think the 17-mile run that I did a week ago took quite a bit out of me, and I hadn't recovered my 50K speed for this race, Truthfully, I could have done with a 100-mile slog this weekend . . . my heart was in Alabama, pining for Pinhoti, and the way I ran today, it seemed like my body was, too. Ultimately, the overall effort was one that I felt like I could have repeated twice more . . . But oh well, live and learn. I'll spend this week running gently, recovering rapidly (I hope), and preparing for my next adventure . . .
All's well that ends with a smoothie from Sheetz (the race's sponsor . . .)
