Running Recappening – Part 2: Electric Boogaloo AKA Fresh for ’18

Uneventful Races:

Not every race is a gold-mine of gif- and meme-worthy happenin’s. Some of them are just… about as exciting as you’d think from “I ran for this many hours.”

Or I just can’t remember the details – since some of ’em were almost a solid year ago by now – and will be in no way bothered to look them up.

• Bel Monte (50-Miler)
  • Still fun for having a surprisingly brutal cut-off, relatively speaking. (Thirteen hours for a mountainous fifty miles.)
• Charlottesville 10-Miler
  • Kinda cold, I think? May have gotten my fastest time, but, eh. (Let’s be clear, despite all the running I do, I’m not, like, fast-fast. I’m fast… for a guy my size… over certain distances… in certain conditions… etc…)
• Charlottesville Marathon
  • Okay, I’m a little bit embarrassed that I literally forgot about a marathon when tallying up the races I ran in 2018, and only remembered it as I was tallying up this year’s total race mileage in comparison to the previous year’s… (They were basically the same, a bit over 1,000 km give or take a loop here, a 5k there.)
• Promise Land 50k++
  • Also still fun. Pretty sure I ended up sprinting the last couple of miles downhill after seeing somebody behind me. May have pretended to be a Warhound Titan as I sprayed water from my vest to cool myself down controlled plasma reactor temperatures via emergency coolant flush.

UROC (100k)

Brother was getting over being sick, so instead of running, he just paced me for the last 18 miles or so. This was the first race I’ve run where fewer than half of the starters finished. (Yes, yes, by one DNF, and only according to UltraSignup (UROC itself lists fewer starters), but still.)

It was crazy-hot and, during the late evening when I was finishing, the Forest Service was doing a controlled burn nearby. The secondhand smoke was thick enough that my headlamp threw a visible cone.

Also of note – and it’s important to point out that volunteers at these things are fucking amazing, and dealing with adversity is part of the whole deal (if you want an aid station every twenty minutes with four types of beverages and pre-ripped gels and chewies, big flags every mile with clocks showing your pacing, then… something something pansy road-runners) – Whetstone South, at one point, ran out of water.

From Whetstone North to South is 11.4 miles of rolling, sometimes-rocky ridgeline trail. And once you get to South, you turn around and head back over those same 11.4 miles to Whetstone North. So… imagine coming in off of the trail – and this day was a scorcher, even early (you hit Whetstone South at 18.1 miles) – and finding out that there was no water.

And it was about three hours (at least; median pace was 15-16 minutes, and this was early, but there were also some road / gravel road segments throughout compared to this trail) until you could get some water.

Yeah.

This had something to do with the low finishing %.

Old Dominion (100M)

I finished this one about three, four something in the morning, in the pouring rain. Luckily, it was in the upper sixties / low seventies, or else I would probably have ended up medevaced, because the minute I stopped running (and I mean minute; looking at the heart rate display on my Fenix was when I realized that yup, bad times happening) my heart rate started to drop.

Not, like, drop as in “return to normal from the higher-than-average rate experienced during exercise”. Drop, as in “wave fucking bye-bye to your normal resting heart rate and heellloooo, low thirties!“. (To be clear, I was still shivering and aware, and my sittin’ around resting heart rate is normally fifty-something, so I wasn’t that hypothermic, but definitely on the way there.)

Yeah, fortunately I’d just gotten a new Salomon vest (old one finally gave out) and neglected to take out the mylar emergency blanket, so I managed to get that out and wrapped around me. Still took me a good fifteen minutes to realize that I should take off my soaked tank top first, though. By the time my brother finished I’d collected two disposable rain ponchos and borrowed an afghan from someone’s car and, as he put it, looked like a huddled babushka.

Which meant that when he heard me shouting for him and promptly yelled back “FUCK YOU!!!” he was – for a moment – worried that he’d just cursed out some little old grandmotherly lady.

Right, yeah. There had been a… kind of… communication had been less than stellar at one point. TL;DR – I ended up leaving my brother behind on a long climb, and pushing ahead to try to break 24 hours for a buckle.

Which I did, because as we agreed afterwards, the only thing worse than leaving him behind to go for the cut-off would be leaving him behind and not making the cutoff. Like, if you steal my beer, that’s bad. But if you steal my beer, I’d much rather you, y’know, drink it, rather than pour it onto the ground.

Still…

12-Hour ATR

We ran this one as a warmup / practice race for the GORUCK Star Course the next month. Short (i.e., low double digits and below) runs with the weighted rucks had been going fine, but shit get different past the first marathon, yo. Turned out fine, though – 45 and a half miles in about eleven and three-quarters hours, over rolling trails, so our crude guesses at pace-planning for the Star Course seemed borne out. Ran into a guy who was also prepping for the Star Course, though he wasn’t running with weight this day.

Only wrinkle we faced was in keeping the ruck plates from audibly clunking on the pavers under the shelter when we were refilling the hydration bladders. Woulda drawn some odd looks and attention we preferred to do without.

Guardians’ Gauntlet

Fun and local obstacle course race, but the organization was…

• Show up and find out that 2 of our 5 (IIRC) team members who’d registered were not listed on our team. Those of us who were grouped properly, were in different waves… neither of which were the competitive wave. (Our team was in the competitive division.)
• At the starting line, T-minus less than two minutes, we call out to ask which way we’re supposed to be heading – along the path to the left into the woods, or up the hill parallel to the parking lot? One of the race staff comes out with spray chalk and adds a line up the hill.
• Got smoked early by a legit-fast dude, and spent the rest of the race running a little ways behind the second-place guy. Relevant, because it meant that there was no-one for us to follow when –
  • We got to the creek segment and ended up standing on the bank shouting about where do we go now? After several seconds the volunteer clarifies that we should run to the other yellow tape, not that yellow tape. And,
  • We come to the tee at the start of the last paved bit. Arrows pointing towards us from both sides. Call out to a volunteer – they say to take the right. We cite the arrow pointing not to the right. They say run that way anyways. We run that ways – it loops us around a hundred yards and drops us off ten yards up the hill. We repeat our request for navigational assistance and they clarify that they meant the other, unmarked right turn, with neither chalk markings nor flag, at the bottom of the hill. The one we ran right past and they didn’t say a word.
• Catch up and overtake everyone who’d gotten ahead on that little extra 100-yard excursion, and crossed the line 4th, behind running partner, legit-fast dude and some random dude that we never saw pass us, and my teammates behind me never saw pass them, but who somehow snagged 2nd. Given the course, there’s no reason to suspect malicious intent.
• Our team gets 1st Place in the team category! Awesome! Find out, though, that our placing was – somehow – based on the average of two times, mine and the second-fastest dude on our team, despite there being three people who ran registered to our team at the beginning of the day, five people registered at the beginning of the race, and a minimum of four times required for a team to place?

Grindstone

Hoo boy. This one was fun. Let’s start with the memes:

Let’s see… some more high points:

• The tip broke off of one of my collapsible trekking poles and then, maybe forty, fifty miles later, the stub wore down enough for the internal ‘tendon’ to detach. Fortunately, an aid station had some duct tape, so I was able to spiral-wrap the sections back together.
• Aid stations served a full menu – as in, they switched from night-time snacks, to breakfast, to lunch, dinner, back to night-time snacks…
• Finishing in thirty-four hours and change, starting from 1800 Friday night, meant that by the time we crossed the finish line Sunday morning I was essentially on my third day in a row being awake. At the last aid station I took my glasses off and had my brother slap me a few times. It helped!
• At some point – as best as can be figured – I ran through something phytophototoxic. My ankles sheeted up with blisters and I spent about a week losing thin layers of skin. Of course, I didn’t notice this until we’d been running for 30+ hours, so my first worry was that I was being eaten by moths. (Some of the blisters formed during the race had broken by that point, and I mistook the hanging skin for pearlescent moth-wings in the glow of my headlamp.)
• In addition to losing the ability to localize sound (if my brother happened to be directly enough behind me, I thought there was someone on both sides) and trying to drink from my trekking poles (“I’m holding something in my hand, it must be a water bottle!”), I had a number of fun hypnagogic ‘glitches’ in perception.
  • Thinking that a field of leaves was in fact blanketed with empty gel / bar wrappers.
  • Imagining that the gravel road was a scrolling DDR board serving as the tape for a Universal Turing Machine for which I was the read/write head and also I was a robot.
  • Pretty much 50% of the trees illuminated by my headlamp were, at one point, thought to be artificial structures – torii gates, bridges, shelters, etc.

GORUCK Philly Star Course

See here.

Richmond nohtaraMarathon

For my birthday my brother and I ran the Richmond marathon course backwards starting at about 2AM (finish line to starting corral), and then ran it forwards for reals during the marathon in the sunlit morning. Part of our walk to the “‘”starting line”‘” took us past one of the VCU dorms at about one-thirty, two in the morning, where we got to avert our eyes from a couple of campus policemen putting a club-wear attired coed into the back of a squad car.

She was cry-screaming that they were doing this just “because [she’s] not white!”

Ooh, then there was the dude who was open-carrying while raking his lawn. (This was during the marathon proper, i.e., during the daylight hours, BTW.)

And at the end, as we walked through the finishers’ corral, the teenage girl handing out medals told us that, “Oh, by the way, they made a mistake in the course layout, so you guys have a few more miles to go to finish the marathon.”

I shrug and say that, sure, I mean, we ran one marathon already before this one, and then this marathon, so even if we have a couple more miles, whatever. Sure.

She chuckles.

Brother hadn’t cleared his Fenix yet, so he shows her the activity summary.

Devil Dog

A loop hundred, pretty warm (well, 40’s towards 50’s by the end, so… warm by December standards), of which about 70+ miles were slogging through mud! Highlights included some random dude’s pacers who not only lost their runner, but had absolutely no business being out on the trails, as well as an amazing aid station with a full bar at which I indulged in a glass of pancake-coffee-syrup. (Though, as was pointed out to me, not technically a wet bar, as though they had running water from a hose, they did not have an actual sink.)

Then there was our dad, our long-suffering and much appreciated crew, regaling us at the mile ~40 aid station stop about how he’d randomly gotten two free donuts when he went to get coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Seashore Nature Trail

This one was basically our “cooldown run” for the year. Rolling terrain, late start time (we’re used to four/five in the morning, so eight-thirty was cray-cray; also, neither of us remembered/bothered to look up what time it started, so got there planning on an 0800 start…), good forecast, short distance… after three hundreds*, we figured it’d be nice to have a relaxing fun run to finish things out before a few months off.

And we did! If anything, the weather was too “good”. I mean, it was supposed to be upper fifties / low sixties and raining. Instead, it was mid-sixties, no rain, no wind… I mean, I was walking back to last (almost twisted my knee being a badass sprinting the last five miles stepping back onto the trail after a piss, so I was taking it easy once I’d crossed the finish line), in ranger panties and VFFs, shirtless, and I was not in the least cold.

… and that was it for the year.

* I refuse to use the slang “hundo” for a hundred-miler, because A) I don’t like the sound of it, and B) Google sez it’s pretty much predominantly used for mountain bike races rather than running, although the frequency differential may be a function of the sample composition; i.e. lots more people bike a hundred miles (“crazy”) than run a hundred miles (“are you fucking out of your mind!?”).

At least, maybe? I think? Not bothering to check.