(FYI, this was the 2017 Pine Creek Challenge in Pennsylvania.)
0: Okay, I guess we’re really doing this then. Six AM – we start running.
1: It sounds really cliche to say ‘you don’t run a hundred miles, you run one mile a hundred times’, or that ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’, so to hell with that noise.
The first mile of any race, for me, is like jumping into cold water – kinda panicky and I have to remind myself, it’s okay, you’ve got this, just relax and get going. Keep going. Just not too fast.
2: Still paranoid about every step, every breath. There’s a long way to go. There’s no way to win an ultramarathon in the first five, ten, maybe twenty miles, but there are a helluva lotta ways to lose one. We’re obviously not in this to win it, but we do have a goal of a day (i.e., we want to be back at the finish line and finished [since it’s a sorta-loop/sorta-out-and-back course] by six AM tomorrow), and it would be hellaciously embarrassing to twist an ankle on, like, mile three.
3: Did not twist my ankle!
4: Did not gas myself, either. Kept to a nice and steady pace alongside my brother.
5: First aid station, wheeling around and heading back. Not much more to say – I don’t eat or drink that much this early in a race and I started with snacks in my vest so I don’t need to refuel, and it’s not a landmark on this visit – we’re just running to cover distance right now. Later on we’ll be running aid station to aid station, but right now it’s just mile, mile, mile.
6: I eat cookies, I think. Maybe?
7: Becoming properly morning. We joke about how we’ll be able to say “good morning”, “good afternoon”, “good evening”, “good night”, and “good morning” again during the course of one run.
8: Pace stays the same. It’s slow. (“Start slow, then taper off.”) A couple minutes slower than my normal to- and from-workout pace. Feels like we could keep it up forever. Forever, however, will slip into the rearview mirror fifty miles from now…
9: The 100k race started later, so we’ve been passing runners coming towards us on the first outbound leg for a while now. No difference in bib color or attire, which makes it kinda nice that the two distances being run on the trail today are so similar (relatively speaking, I mean…) and their starting times so close, given the difference in cut-off.
Nothing like sharing mile 22 of a marathon course with mile 5 of the half…
10: Hit the bridge again, and joke that it accounts for probably 50% of the total course elevation. (My brother specifically looked for the flattest 100-miler that was logistically feasible. Next year, however, we’ve signed up for the Old Dominion 100. 14,000 feet of gain vs… about 900, here.)
11: We pass the starting aid station and head out for the first long out-and-back. Starting to feel a bit comfortable – finding my stride, stuck in, really doing this.
12: Not much happened, honestly. Some miles are like that.
13: No announcement is made of a half-marathon down. When you’ve got almost eight of ’em to do, they kinda lose their luster. (I mean, come on, it has “half” in the name.) We aren’t about half measures – we’re going full retard.
14: It turns out that doing an ultramarathon or more each month – 50ks, bumping up to 50-milers or 100ks here and there, sometimes doubling up – is actually good training for a 100-miler. My brother and me – we do stupid, stupid things, but we (try to) do them smart-like.
15: It’s a good aid station, it’s just not The Best Aid Station Ever™.
16: More food is eaten. Something something “eating and drinking contest with some running mixed in” but seriously – counting BMR, we’re each burning in excess of 12,000 calories over these 24 (hopefully just) hours. (And yes, walking only burns about half that of running, per mile, but given that we’ll only start walking regularly (hopefully) after the halfway point, and our walking efficiency will go way down by the end, the 100-calories-per-mile rule still applies for purposes of bulleted-blog-post-point-nonsense.)
17: There’s a slight incline to the trail – apart from the hill at one turnaround and the bridge near the beginning – or at least, there has to be because there’s a river next to it, but while deducible it’s nevertheless imperceptible. That is all.
18: We pass an outhouse whose walls are faced with perhaps the worst – not to mention contextually inappropriate, i.e. not at all in keeping with the Northeastern rustic aesthetic – plastic-cast and spray-painted fake stone either of us have ever seen.
19: Discussion ensues about the circumstances in and degree to which skeuomorphism is acceptable. This is not the first race in which we have had this discussion.
20: I drink water. I ended up drinking about 13 liters this race, which was actually less than I’d expected (Norums sweat a lot) because it was perfect weather, nice and cool throughout.
21: Fuckin’ A-MURICA! A bald eagle on the other side of the river regards our progress. The Team RWB group ahead of us is running with an American flag – a picture is taken of the flag planted and waving with the eagle overseeing.
22: HOLY SHIT THE AID STATION HAS CHOCOLATE-COVERED ESPRESSO BEANS!!! This is literally the first time I have seen these supplied during a race.
23: The aid station also had all of the tiny snacks (espresso beans, M&Ms, trail mix, etc.) in tiny little baggies. Attention to detail for the win.
24: I mean, sure, it is a bit counter to their strict no-littering policy, and I’m normally not all about excess plastic packaging, especially in a single-use setting, but I’m also not at all about other people’s sweaty, sticky, snotty, all-round grubby hands digging in communal bowls of sugar.
(I mean, not that I’m about my hands doing that either, but the foodstuffs have to touch the hands that eats them, just not the others’ hands.)
25: Yes, that aid station note was split up to fill in the miles. Lots of random stuff is done to fill in the miles, mentally.
26: We are now officially more than a quarter of the way done.
27: “Hey, cool, we just ran a marathon.” (Like I said.)
28: I go on at length about just how thoroughly JJ Abrams has ruined not just the Star Trek franchise but, more specifically, the character of James T. Kirk, citing examples from decades of material from the core continuity, the Shatnerverse, and the expanded universe.
29: I’m still going on about Star Trek. This is allowed because, with (hopefully not more than) twenty-four hours to fill, allowances are made for babbling random bullshit.
30: Almost at the turnaround point. For the first lap.
31: The 50k mark passes without much fanfare. We pass the aid station, do an out-and-back half a mile over a bridge and to a gate, and then hit up the aid station for reals.
32: I grabbed a bag of homemade cookies from my drop bag at Blackwell. They last, maybe, the next mile out of the aid station. Fortunately, I packed more than one but, since there’s no way in hell I’m going back to get them now, I’ll just have to wait to get them ’til the next time through.
In 50 49 miles.
33: Minor case of the doldrums – every race for me, to some extent, there’s a moment – usually before now, but this race is a lot longer, so it’s proportionally right on time – where I wonder, for a moment or a minute, just what the fuck I am doing. Where I think how colossally stupid this is, spending all these hours running and running and, just, what the fuck, dude? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS!?
34: Doldrums past.
35: Lots of Amish / Mennonite folk out bicycling. Seen in a distance, weaving around like a squadron of World War II fighter planes testing their weapons, my first thought was that it was a local gang of wayward youths. (Are bicycle gangs a thing anymore? Apparently so, according to Wikipedia and Google.)
36: Eat some dates. So delicious.
37: The mile markers in this section of trail are placed approximately a mile apart, some more, some less. The overall mileage is still pretty spot-on (see Mile 53), but the variance between my Garmin, my brother’s Garmin, and the markers themselves makes pacing measurement somewhat tricky.
38: Might have begun to walk – briskly – every now and then around here. We’re only human, after all.
39: Good aid station is still good.
40: Sadly, the eagle that we passed earlier is no longer there. I realize that we passed through here like… nineteen miles ago?
Oh. No wonder the eagle’s gone by now.
41: We discuss how long the Long Walk might be. 48+ hours, so at a conservative 2 MPH they could cover ~100 miles total, but if we don’t count the initial 12 miles of the PT test, and keeping in mind that the welcome party goes until at least midnight, leaving, what, call it 36 hours for the rest of the event, then…
Yeah, so it turns out that Selection is “80+ Miles”. Or in other words, exactly what we’re doing right now.
Only with 45+ pound rucksacks on our backs.
And a solid 24+ hours of PT and logs and sandbags and push-ups and lunges and crawls and water mixed in.
And instead of aid stations with (spoiler alert!) Keurigs and smoothies and enthusiastic reassurances of how great we’re doing and exactly how far we have left to go and how strong we look and how sure they are that we will make it, we get nine or more Special Forces cadre acting as if our mere presence is a grievous insult not just to them personally, but to everything they stand for.
…Anything can be made to look easy by comparison, even running 100 miles.
42: Our pace is starting to slow a little bit, but we’re still chugging along, making good time.
43: My brother’s taking care of the pacing calculations. We’re still in good enough shape and have enough of a time buffer that he doesn’t have to start lying to me, not yet.
44: Same outhouse. Still ugly. On an out-and-back, it’s easier to see the same stuff, because you see it twice – like sliding up and down a piano keyboard, whoosh-whoosh and you’re done. Shorter loop races like Cacapon, you can start to get sorta familiar with the course, get an intuitive sense of it.
This is ugh. Outhouse still ugly.
45: A little bit bored, now. No longer passing that many people in either direction. Go miles, sometimes, without seeing another person. The ratio of people to distance, modulo the 25-mile length of the trail, over a long enough time sees us reach a nearly uniform distribution as we approach the central peak of the elapsed-time distribution.
Like I said, a little bit bored.
46: I go on about Cadian military slang, how “unbroken” doesn’t necessarily mean the squad’s whole, hale, and hearty; just that they’re still capable of accomplishing their mission. Similarly, “broken” doesn’t mean that they’re fleeing or completely combat-ineffective, just that they’re no longer capable of accomplishing their objectives.
(Fresh squad trying to take a bridge and finding it held by Traitor Astartes with a Land Raider? Broken. Single trooper, bleeding out and concussed, crawling towards a void shield generator with a backpack of melta bombs? Unbroken.)
We are unbroken.
47: They’ve started to collect deadwood for the fire pit that will be ignited overnight. Realize that we’re not yet halfway through time-wise. Keep running.
48: Eat Pop-Tarts.
49: Drink water.
50: Halfway through as we pass back through the starting aid station! Another ten miles and we’ll be heading out for the hard part of the race. Yes, I’m fully aware of how ridiculous this all is.
51: I see the same dog that I saw this morning! At least, I think it’s the same dog – I wasn’t totally paying attention at 5:55 AM, and it’s been a long time since then, but the dog – and the young lady walking it – look the same, by which I mean I can’t see anything that’s different for sure.
52: Solidly past the halfway point and still chugging along. Not much more to say about this mile.
53: Coming up on the turnaround aid station, I calculate that my watch (Fenix 3) is about +0.2% different from the posted/state mileage of the course so far. My brother’s (Fenix 5) is about 30% over, presumably due to the UltraTrac mode which, as a quick search while writing this shows, apparently is not intended for running.
Given that, they probably shouldn’t have started with “Ultra” when naming it.
54: “Hey, cool, we just ran another marathon.”
55: Okay, now I’m starting to hurt a bit. I don’t normally do drugs during races, but with forty-five miles to go, I do note that I carry drugs during races, just in case.
56: I do drugs. (Fine, fine – I pop a couple of aspirin, couple of Aleve, and a trio of ibuprofen.) And also eat cookies. Cookies first, then drugs.
57: I DON’T CARE IF IT’S JUST A PLACEBO BECAUSE HOLY SHIT I CAN SEE WHY WE SPEND TRILLIONS MAKING THIS STUFF!!! Well, okay, not that good, but I’m back to feeling kinda normal and okay, which 50+ miles in is pretty awesome. Cookies are good, too.
58: We encounter ZFG cat sitting in the middle of the trail. At first, from a distance, I thought it was a squirrel. Then it was a bit big for a squirrel. As we got closer, the cat crouched down, ears flat, ready to spring away. And then, as we ran by it on either side, it flipped onto its back and started rolling around in the sand and gravel. ZFG indeed, cat.
59: I begin shouting updated lines from the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man. “MAKING ME RUN UP THAT HILL WON’T BRING BACK YOUR GOD DAMN HONEY!!!”
(The ‘hill’ is in fact a bridge that rises, perhaps, ten feet to the center of the span.)
60: “Here the racin’ doth commence…” The real race begins. Not that, you know, 60 miles is nothin’, but a) we’ve run this far before, and b) nobody cares what you can do when you’re fresh.
61: I eat the most delicious hotdog of my life. Seriously – generic hotdog and bun, mustard, no relish so I tossed on a handful of those little gherkins, season with twelve hours of running? Best. Hotdog. EVER.
62: We’re passed by the first-place runner coming back. He’d end up finishing about ten hours ahead of us.
63: I forget to say my Samwise Gamgee quote. (“This is it – if I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest I’ve ever run.”)
64: More runners pass us. I wonder for a second, holy shit there are a lot of fast motherfuckers out here. My brother points out that with the thirty-hour cutoff, and our rapid 100k pace, they’re probably coming back from their first loop.
Oh.
65: It starts to get dark enough to need a headlamp – about two hundred yards out of the last aid station I realized I’d forgotten mine in my drop bag there, but my brother had a spare. I never run with a light in town, but out here in the mountains (okay, so we were on a flat railroad trail, but there were mountains around us) a little red-lensed headlamp provides just enough illumination to avoid stepping into a hole. If I lift my chin a bit it’s weak enough to vanish into the middle-distance, so good times.
66: Eat cookies.
67: My brother begins to calculate pacing for reals. We’re still on track, but we’re starting to feel the mileage.
68: The ‘stone’-walled outhouse is still just as ugly as ever.
69: This was a very boring mile. Nothing much of note happened. Maybe we discussed GPS watches? Mine was accurate, which is to say his was nowhere near accurate whatsoever, but then again, mine was just about dead, so…
70: In preparation for my watch dying, I being pace-counting in my head. Don’t pull out the ranger beads, but just keep up a steady “right, left, right, 1, 1, 2, 3, 2, etc.” Every second I spend counting is a second I’m not thinking about… a second I’m not thinking, but a second still that I’m running moving.
71: My watch finally dies. ‘Twas good while it lasted.
72: My FitBit rolls over 100,000 steps, I think. Somewhere around or near here. We check and the One does indeed display six-digit step counts without issue. (At the last TJ100K my brother’s FitBit display started cutting off half of the ‘1’.)
73: We roll into Tiadaghton for the third time:
“Wait, you have coffee?”
“Yup. What kind do you want?” [Points to Keurig hooked up to a generator. Other aid station volunteer pipes up -] “Would you like a smoothie?”
“Yes, yes I would like a smoothie, please.”
[Keurig kicks off, blender grinds away.]
BEST. AID STATION. EVER.
74: We look over our shoulders for the Northern Lights, to no avail. (It was iffy to begin with, but a major solar storm had made it at least not impossible.)
75: “Less than a marathon to go!”
76: Joking about Leadville (we didn’t make the lottery this year), I once remarked “the third marathon, now that’s the difficult one”.
I was wrong. So, so wrong.
77: Somewhere around here I almost kick a porcupine. I thought it was a skunk.
(Not that I would have kicked it if it had been a skunk, of course. I was running with a dim, red-filtered light because I’m used to the dark but it was on enough of a trail I wanted to protect my ankles, and it looked like a skunk, so I veered well clear of it. Upon further consideration, however, it was trundling instead of the smoother, more fluid and squirrelly motion of a skunk.
So, porcupine.)
78: It’s dark, and I’m not running with that bright of a light setting, and my watch has died and there are lots of vertical post-looking things on the verge of the woods, so I keep wondering with every glimpse if this has been a mile yet. Most of the time, it hasn’t.
79: Coming up on Blackwell again. Last chance to grab things from the drop bags there until they’re brought back to the start around six in the morning – about seven or so hours from now. Start planning what I want to do at the aid station. Hope they have ibuprofen.
80: Turnaround for the last time. From here on, it’s a straight shot back to the starting line, now magically transmuted to the finish line.
81: We change (or in my case, just shake out) shoes, refuel and rehydrate, and grab extra layers for the return leg once we finish the over-the-bridge out-and-back at Blackwell. I’m pleasantly surprised that my feet are able to make it back into my shoes (later that… technically the same morning, I’d have to let out the laces on my Lunas in order to even start to fit my feet into them). Homemade cookies are delicious. (They will be gone within the next mile. I am bad at pacing myself.) Loan out extra batteries.
82: Yes, it’s still painful, but at least now we’re on the home stretch. I.e., sure, there are still almost twenty miles to go, but those twenty miles are in a straight (ish) line to the finish. No more of this “out and back” nonsense. Every step is a few feet closer to being done, in an absolute spatial as well as procedural sense.
83: My right foot starts to hurt a bit, from repeated impact. Yes, I run in VFFs.
84: I mention steering clear of the ‘skunk’ earlier, even though I realized afterwards that it was a porcupine. Still, steered clear to be on the safe side. My brother points out that porcupines can’t actually throw their quills. That’s only in Diablo II.
85: “What do you know about manticores?”
“GODDAMN NEAR EVERYTHING MR PRESIDENT!”
86: We agree to run the next mile and meet up by the aid station just up ahead. (Well, three miles still counts as “just”, albeit just.)
87: Feeling good running, compensating for the right foot, but now there’s a titch of scritch in the front of my left ankle. Minor inflammation of the tibialis anterior. Not structural, not worrisome in itself, but compensating for stuff like that can lead to cascading, asymmetrical failures.
88: Scavenging fallen branches from the side of the trail to use as trekking poles, I start running like a very clumsy Crow Fisher.
89: Approaching the Best Aid Station Ever my stomach decides it’s had it for the evening day night whatever and sends the shut-down signal. No real upset, just a flat – nope, not worth it. Takes energy to digest, and sure, takes-money-to-make-money and all that, but it’s just not in the budget right now.
90: Tiadaghton has ibuprofen. Still the best aid station ever.
91: We now have three makeshift walking sticks between the two of us. Extrapolating from this, we expect to roll across the finish line in a crude, cargo-cult type of coupe, Flintstones-style.
92: Somewhere around here is a random NRA-style hunting lodge that, from what we can see through the windows, is sort of exactly the kind of place our grandfather would’ve had.
93: It’s cold. I picked up a second shirt at our drop bags, thirteen miles ago. Half a marathon. Stopping to put it on isn’t an option right now; at least, not one that would result in any improvement in performance.
I am a bit cold. My legs are nearly dead.
I wrap the shirt around my neck and chest and stagger on.
94: We pass the outhouse with the ugly downright gauche fake stone for the fourth and final time. Far too tired to give a fuck, however.
95: Honestly not that much to say about this mile. You count your steps, waiting for the next marker to show up in your headlamp, distract yourself, don’t think at all, just plod along. Plod-plod-plod.
96: Seeing the glint of far-off firelight at a time like this reminds you of just what a big deal light and warmth are – how awesome fire is – in the grand scheme of things.
97: We pass another aid station. The last aid station. We thank them for being out here and barely stop. (Not that our moving is too far removed from stopping, in an absolute delta-vee sense.) The aid station doesn’t matter, doesn’t exist. All that’s left are the three-point-seven miles until the finish line.
98: The sun begins to poke through, in a vague sort of thrice-removed way, from clouds to mountaintops and back up to clouds, as the black world around us lightens towards grey.
99: We count off and count down landmarks approaching the turnoff. Farms on the left, a freeway-style wooden sound-barrier/fence thing next, and so on.
100: The first aid station comes into view. It is deserted, packed-up, gone, with only a flashing light pointing us off the trail towards the parking lot and the finish line. It takes me a hundred-plus yards, several minutes, to realize just what that flashing light is and what it means.
100.7: The clock by the finish line reads “23:59:03”. Okay. This is going to hurt. A lot. A lot more, I mean. LEEEROY JENKINS!
100.75: My brother points out that what I thought was a ‘9’ is, in fact, a ‘3’.
It still hurts.
100.8: We are done. We can barely walk. My feet look like Deadpool’s face.
Don Norum 