… and, fittingly enough, 3 months late!
Overall mileage was down about two hundred and change from the year before (a big chunk of which was due to the week I spent in Phoenix coughing blood and fretting about a pulmonary embolism), but similar race plan as 2018 – focus on bigger, funner races mixed in with some “training runs” and sentimental favorites mixed in.
Made sure to put the detail-shot of the charm bracelet of human toenails after the jump. I’m just considerate like that.
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.” (Isn’t this copied from last year? Why yes, yes it is!)
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 which, because of the snow and then slush and then mud, we came pretty close to this year.) Started off with falling snow, ended up a slushy mud-slide (though not as bad as Devil Dog 2018). Hella foggy at the end, so our trekking poles + shoes in the gloaming made like frickin’ lobster-spiders out of The Mist. Disappointed, a bit, that they added an hour to the cutoff for 2020. (Of course, it’s still a week and change until the 2020 race, so…
- Charlottesville 10-Miler
- Kinda cold, I think? Bit slower than last year. Lost track of the, like, two other people I knew running it and froze afterwards trying to find them. Finally tweaked the settings on my Fenix to stop it from beeping at me every mile!
- Charlottesville Marathon
- Um… Training run, basically? (To be clear, I mean, like, a four-hour or whatever marathon. I’m not out here busting out sub-3s and calling them training runs. I think I’d have to actually plan and train to have a hope of a sub-3, which means it ain’t happening without a damn good reason.)
- Promise Land 50k++
- Also still fun. Specifically remember quipping at the last aid station, when someone’s crew was wondering about how long until their runner reached the finish, that it wouldn’t be long from there – thirty-five, forty minutes. I kinda forgot it was seven miles still, and ended up having to really push it, including a serious stretch of coked-out-orangutanning on the last downhill road bit, to be not-an-asshole for it.
- Obviously, no-one would have known if I hadn’t, and since I’ve encountered both GPS glitches and Horton “””mischeviously””” mis-marking aid station mileages on the course, I could be forgiven for miscalculating, but I’d know.
- Also still fun. Specifically remember quipping at the last aid station, when someone’s crew was wondering about how long until their runner reached the finish, that it wouldn’t be long from there – thirty-five, forty minutes. I kinda forgot it was seven miles still, and ended up having to really push it, including a serious stretch of coked-out-orangutanning on the last downhill road bit, to be not-an-asshole for it.
UROC
Totes better than last year! I, uh, can’t remember much about this, however. I probably had a bunch of stuff scribbled down at the house, but since I’m writing this at work^H^H^H^H^H^H^H on my lunch hour in a different room of my house from where those scribbled notes currently are I’m not bothering to look them up.
GORUCK DC Star Course
Yeah, this one was pretty exhaustively covered already.
Old Dominion
Pretty straightforward race – most of it on the road. Nothing too crazy went down, we stuck together, and ended up buckling with about fifteen minutes to spare, I think.
Steve has since pointed out that this was our (his) most precisely planned race to date in terms of pacing, aid station strategy, target times, etc., and we actually hewed pretty closely to it. Surprisingly so. I kinda followed his plan – like the above, he’s a better runner qua runner, I just kinda… do stuff.
Right, the whole pulmonary embolism thing! See, I had a bit of a cough during the race. I figured – it’s hot, trails are dusty, we had a few sprinkles but, unlike last year, there wasn’t any rain so the air was pretty dry. However, I must have also picked up some sort of cold or respiratory bug either during the race or the day after, when I flew through ATL to Phoenix, Arizona for some on-site consulting work.
(And this was on top of having a pulled back muscle from rolling at open mat in the days leading up to OD, as in, I pulled it the Thursday before the Saturday stepping-off.)
Long race + airplane + you know, spending the first couple of days out west coughing up bloody mucus = worried about pulmonary embolism, until I realized that while that was a plausible, and perhaps narratively convincing explanation, the odds that long race + hot dusty air + pre-existing cough + airports + continuous hot, dry air out West = far more likely to just be an irritated throat and a bad chest cold.
Which it turned out to be, almost certainly, since, you know. I didn’t die or anything.
STPT Big Hooyah
So, fun times! Good race overall, but… fun times! Started out in second place, just behind the top Richmond BUD/S team, a few seconds back out of the first exercise (push-ups) station onto the trail. Follow the orange flags, check. Come out of the trail onto the ring road around a cemetery, see the orange flags to the right, follow ’em.
Few minutes later, hear the “Bring it in!” call filter up from the trail of runners – we were supposed to stop there for the second set of exercises before jumping back into the woods onto the trail again, like, ten yards down the road.
It turned out that there was supposed to be one of the instructors there manning the station, only he wasn’t there. He’d shown up a minute or so after the first group had gone through. A couple of the guys on the team had asked the instructor what was up as the rest of us caught back up backwards to join back in, and his explanation was:
One of the challenges along the route was a thirty-second underwater breath-hold station by the bank of the James. If you got there early and logged your thirty-second hold, you were then able to go back to last and help the other members of your team make their thirty seconds, too.
Ended up getting first place for all-male teams, which was confusing us for a second until I pointed out how a lot of races will take the top X overall and then go for the top X in a more specific category. So you could have an all-male 1st-place team in addition to the 1st-place all-male team. The little unintentional detour / handicapping at the start hurt us a bit, as did my haring off the wrong way out of an unmarked intersection to, uh… check it out and make sure that the rest of the team wouldn’t make a wrong turn? And it worked, ’cause they didn’t!
But anyways, the team that won it overall was, like, four dudes, of whom two were en route to BUD/S and one of the others was pre-BUD/S slash on the intake track.
Grindstone
We did a whole lot better this yeah! Almost two whole hours faster, which is… okay, like maybe a <6% improvement. But much less hallucinating this time around! Random fun bit was accidentally taking a shot of Fireball at one of the aid stations in the middle of the race.
So I had my buttered pancake and, as you do, grabbed a cup of syrup off the table. Bite of pancake, pour syrup into my mouth, repeat until done. Set it back down, and the guy notices what I just did and asks my if I just drank that syrup.
(Mind you, I didn’t put my lips to the cup. I’m not a savage.)
‘Cause, he says, they’ve been mixing up “syrup shots” with the Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey behind the aid station. And sure, yeah, this was like, 9:30 in the morning, but the aid stations went up overnight, so…
Speaking of not having slept in days, another fun bit was the chance to spout off with a long impromptu nuclear / atomic physics seminar during the hella-long climb right before the last downhill / BSA camp stretch. Started with chatting with a guy who fell in with us, who’d been in the Army, about weapons of mass destruction, and went on to cover various uranium enrichment technologies, theory and engineering of multiple models of nuclear warheads, and uses of lasers from IR designators to manipulation of individual valence electrons.
My brother later said that he’d heard the dude tell one of his friends that we were the most interesting people he’d ever met.
The other big highlight of the race was finishing up and feeling a little bit of a tightness, almost a pain, on the inside of both knees, just below the kneecap. Now, I had some issues with my ankles last year (not, like, structural injuries; I had some sort of toxic reaction and the skin blistered and sheeted off and I thought that moths were eating my flesh but that last bit was probably just the hallucinations heading into hour forty-something without sleep) so this year I wore calf sleeves overlapped with my socks.
Still, just to be sure, I went ahead and asked a couple of the med staff sitting around if it was anything to worry about, what it could be.
The med staff hear me out and then ask, “Didn’t you just run a hundred miles?”
Yeah. That was what it was.
GORUCK Philly Star Course
ALSO exhaustively covered already. (Like, literally exhaustively, this one and the DC Star Course, ’cause when I finished finally banging together the AARs as a rush job right after, GUH.)
Marine Corps Marathon 50k (MCM50K)
So, course planning left a little bit to be desired, in that:
- The adaptive / wheelchair marathon start was just a little bit after the 50k start, but the only road access to the starting line was right along the start of the 50k route. So we got to dodge racing wheelchairs AKA those-knee-high-death-barrows-from-the-90s-Tom-Swift-book-Mind–Games as we were starting out.
- Then, as we were running along the downhill bit, the racing wheelchairs came whizzing by from behind us at… ludicrous speeds. Fortunately, things were pretty organized – they stayed to the left, runners on the right, two-wide-lanes-plus-shoulders gave us plenty of room.
- Until the 50k turned left after the bridge for some extra distance, while the marathon course which the wheelchairs were following went to the right…
- There was also the bit where the 50k course rejoined the marathon course after, like… whatever. Numbers, man. The point is that if you ran at, say, a nine-minute 50k pace, you got dumped back into the eleven-minute marathon pack. Which had thinned out not one fucking iota of mean free distance by that point. Annoying. Probably contributed to my cold afterwards.
- Absolutely nothing to do with course planning, but the first ten miles or so were nice and cool, great weather. Pouring rain, off and on, for the next eight or so miles. Mile 18 and on? Bright fucking sun on soaked black asphalt. Temperatures jumping twenty degrees from the start. Miserable, and not, like, the good, fun kinda miserable that is Grindstone.
Richmond nohtaraMarathon
Crap, should’ve put this in the uneventful races section above. ‘Cause… it was kinda uneventful? Fun as usual, got to see the overnight tow de force as they cleared the streets with a vengeance, but nothing really notable happened.
Seashore Nature Trail
Usual end-of-the-year cooldown. Ridiculously warm, again. Ran the whole second half shirtless, and… that was it for the year. Good year.
Don Norum 