And I'm Tired Just Watching Him

This is just a testament to the fact that no matter how much you think you do (or how much others think you do), someone else is always doing more, going farther.

I saw this guy on the lakefront here in Chicago late last week:

In case you can't tell, those are two tires he's dragging, tethered to his waist, across an snowy/icy dirt path along the lakefront. I wasn't close enough to see if there was anything inside the tires.

He wasn't running, he was power-walking with trekking poles. I'm not even completely sure what he was training for, though I assume it was a workout for the lower body power muscles. (Maybe it was a final training session for this race, which just started yesterday.) He covered at least 4 or 5 miles like that, because I saw him headed back in the other direction 40 minutes later.

I wonder what happened when he passed the dog play park a mile down the path?

Race Report: 100kout Mountain - Part Four

ABIGAIL

The climb up to the mountain top – almost literally straight up the mountain at times – really, really kicked my ass. (Once on the way up, I turned around and just sat down on the trail. It was that steep, that I could just turn around, lean back, perch on a tree root and sit. Seriously.) Then after puzzling my way through the route around the small boulders on the crest, and the feeling that we’d just never, ever get to the next aid station, I was simply cooked. My legs felt okay, my feet were okay, I wasn’t too chilly, emotionally I was still going, but my energy was spent. I was just bone tired.

I gave myself a leisurely break at the High Point aid station. But the next station at Lula Lake Road was less than 3 miles away. I was lucky to still have a trot left in my legs. That trot got me to Lula Lake Road and I took another long break. They were cooking baked potato chunks there. I salted and ate a whole half plate of them.

The Lula Lake Road station was just a smidge under the 50-mile mark on the course. There were two important things about that. First, I’d gotten there in 12.5 hours. I’ve run two 50-mile races on comparably difficult courses. The first I finished in 11.5 and the second I finished in 13.5. So, to get to 50 in this longer race right between those two times, I took as a really strong accomplishment. Second, I’d never run more than 50 miles before, so every step after this aid station was virgin territory.

Leaving Lula Lake Road, I decided I was going to walk just the first couple of miles. I needed to ease off a little while. Then I’d try to get back into my trot. I had a feeling there was going to be a lot of walking in the last 12 miles. But I was ok with that.

I left with another runner. A slightly built woman in a blue jacket with short cropped, dark hair. I'd been, more or less, in shouting distance of her for the previous 12 miles. But it wasn’t until we’d both been trying to find our way across the top of the mountain that we’d kind of started running together. She had been having even more trouble than I was at following the course as designed. She’d thrown up a white flag and admitted she needed help. I completely agreed. We both might have an easier time if we worked on it together.

She hadn’t gotten that far ahead of me in the 3 miles to Lula Lake Road, and when I left that station, she made the decision to stick with me. She soon explained. She’d done a lot of Ultras and had always tried to run alone on purpose (to quell her overly competitive nature, she said), but she’d recently begun to believe that having a pacer or finding a partner to run with after dark was a good idea. Since we’d been moving along at a similar pace together, she was going to stick with me.

I warned her right from the start that I didn’t expect to be moving very fast, and if she found the pace too slow, I wouldn’t be offended if she moved on, but apparently, she was determined to stick with a buddy regardless.

She had a good reason to slow down, too. She was running on a broken foot! Not only that, it was her third Ultra in four weeks. And she had several more Ultras scheduled in the next month. She said her foot had started to nag at her in these late miles, and she was happy to give it a break anyway.

Her name was Abigail, “But lots of people call me Abby, so I answer to that, too, doesn’t matter.”

Abigail – and I write this with a great deal of affection – Abigail could talk. She was a constantly flowing, never deterred, always upbeat monologue of speech. And it continued, unabated for the next 3+ hours and 11 miles of the course. But I’ll reiterate: I write that with a great deal of affection. Because even though I already knew I was going to finish by that point in the night, I don’t know exactly what state I would have been in without Abigail.

She was way more experienced than me, for one thing. My friends think that I’m a crazy running man? I ran 8 Ultras or Marathons in 2008. Abigail had that many planned just for December and January! So, I was with someone who’d been there and done that. More than once.

Also, I wasn’t kidding about her being upbeat the whole time. She would tell stories and chuckle and tell more stories and ponder and tell stories again. And then I’d apologize for going so slowly and she’d say she didn’t mind because her broken foot was kind of killing her. What? I honestly had to ask myself if that was really true or if she was just saying so to help reassure me.

I honestly was embarrassed that I was moving as slow as I was, and that I was too out of breath, even at the gentle pace, to be able to talk back to her very much. Every now and then I reiterated that, and told her to keep talking; I was enjoying listening to her stories. I’d also tell her again to speed up and move on anytime she wanted, that I wouldn’t be upset if she needed to go.

The truth is, I didn’t really want her to run off – Abigail had a rather profound impact on me. And the reason is the nature of the stuff she talked about while we ran. Of course we covered a number of the usual Ultra chit-chat stuff, the races we’d run, the races we still wanted to run, things like that. But she also veered freely into a great deal of very personal stories about her life, her loves, her husband(s), her career(s), her children, her friendships, and on.

Some of them were good repeatable stories, like the time she asked for and received a chainsaw for her Mother’s Day present.

Or the time, while on he job as an EMT, that she dislocated her own shoulder while pulling a man twice her size from a wrecked car – even though she knew she would dislocate her shoulder in the process and told her fellow EMT so before she did it.

Or how she requires her kids (5 of them, if I remember correctly) to run every weekend except when she goes to run an Ultra, and so they often look forward to her races.

She told me all those things.

But she also volunteered a list of personal and intimate confessions which I would never dare betray by even hinting at their contents here. None of it was criminal or reprehensive, but it was all offered with such honesty – and with such a clear, reflective eye directed at herself – that it all qualified as privileged, personal information.

I asked myself, even as we ran, why she would tell me these things. We ran together for over three hours. The night was black around us. Both our lamps were always focused on the trail in front of us and we never looked at each other. I was generally too tired to speak and was content to simply listen anyway, and she had too much energy not to talk. I suppose in such rare circumstances, confessions are bound to slip out.

But still, she offered me, a complete stranger, a great deal of trust. The only things we knew we had in common were being runners and this race. I suppose that was more than enough. Abigail, if you should ever find yourself reading this, I want you to know, there was never a single ounce of judgment in my mind. Not even for a second. On the contrary, I enjoyed every tale, and admired your honesty, both with me, and with yourself.

I did a lot more walking those last 12 miles than I’d planned after I left the Lula Lake Road station at the 50-mile point. I thought I’d be able to do a lot more trotting, and found, instead, that a brisk walk took most of what I had left. Abigail was kind and told me she’d seen a lot of people 55 miles into a race that would have been thrilled to move at such a quick walking speed. She’d been around enough that I believed her and was buoyed by the compliment. But finally, with a little over a mile left before the finish line, she ran off ahead and disappeared down the trail. She didn’t say anything. We both knew the end wasn’t far below us, and she was eager to be done. It’s hard to hold back when you can smell the barn ahead of you. I’d been telling her for three hours that she should go when she was ready. I understood, but I was sad to see her go.

In the end, I cruised into the finish 72 official seconds behind her. When she crossed the last bridge into the finish line meadow, I could hear the hoops and hollers of the friends and volunteers wafting up the hillside through the trees, and I knew the end was near for me, too.

I collected my finisher’s prize (a handsomely understated Pilsner glass) collected hugs and love from my girlfriend, Laura (who didn’t miss me at a single accessible aid station the whole day), and gave my parents a quick phone call to let them know I wasn’t dead.

It was nice to sit and get some food and enjoy a drink of victory Coca-cola from my new glass (the sweet soda sounded better than a bitter beer), but I was eager to get to the car, change out of the wet clothes and head back to some place warm.

Funny: the last thing Laura had said to me when I left the final aid station was, “don’t make me turn into a pumpkin!” Meaning: Finish before Midnight! It was a friendly, teasing encouragement. But I’m proud to say, I finished about ten minutes before the Pumpkin Hour, so she owes me one. (Har-Har!) My official time was 16:03:31. My pace dropped off pretty dramatically after the 50-mile point, but I couldn’t help feeeling that 16 hours was a pretty respectable finish for a race where I had no time goals. And I beat all the cutoffs, finishing two hours before the course was closed.

All in all, it wasn’t so bad a day. The time passed quickly out there. The sloggy 50-miler I ran back in April was a far more difficult event. 62-miles didn’t seem like such a big, fat, hairy deal. I am still, a month into the New Year, evaluating my race experiences in 2008. I feel that I might need a down year with a few less distance races to help me recharge a little. It may be another year before I take a shot at my first 100-miler. So, I’m all the more pleased to chalk up my first 100(K) successfully.

Race Report: 100kout Mountain - Part Three

NIGHTRUNNING & THE MOUNTAIN PEAK

When I set out on the back half of the course – a new, 24-mile “lollipop” shaped section on the Southwest end of the mountain – I only had 45 minutes of daylight left. But in the thick forest, the available light dimmed a little quicker than that and I was soon in a whole new world as a runner: the Pitch Black Dark.

I’d done a little night running before, but only on a flat, well-groomed, white gravel, road-width forest preserve trail near one of my freelance jobs in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. Even though I usually take a headlamp out with me on that forest preserve trail, I often find there is enough ambient light from nearby towns – or even just the moon – for me to see the white trail good enough without the lamp at all. Extremely gentle conditions.

So, this was a completely new experience for me.

When I first flipped on my headlamp, I could still see a deep blue sky above me, but I was running through the woods and the shadows cast by their thick, looming trunks were too deep for me to see clearly anymore. What was worse, I was running a rolling, narrow, single-track trail that was buried in leaves and pine needles and flooded with rain wash. Every step I took seemed to sink deep into a marsh. Just keeping my balance was tricky.

At first, I tried just using the red light on my lamp. It’s intended to illuminate without destroying all of your night vision. It worked for a little while, but everything was so wet, that it somehow made the world seem darker by default, and the terrain was so uneven, that I couldn’t see far enough ahead of me to do much good anyway.

I switched over to the full, white beam. Now my problem was that the early evening fog and the rain were, kind of, blinding in the full light and I almost lost as much vision as I gained because of it. (If I’d opted for a hand-held lamp instead of one on my forehead, the lower point of origin for the light would have alleviated some of this problem. But I already carried my water bottle, so I chose to keep my other hand empty and available for unexpected events.)

I settled in to a gentle rhythm, but I gotta say, it was harder than I expected. There were sections of the trail, in those final 20 miles, that were wider and straighter and smoother, and when I was on them, the running was a lot easier. But on the winding, narrow single-track, it was really tricky and difficult to move at any regular pace with just the light of my headlamp to guide me. The race leaders had passed me going the other way just before sunset. They were going to be finishing up just before the light was gone. I was starting to envy them. Even if I’d been feeling 100%, there was just a limit to how fast I could move in the dark.

The world shrinks down to not much more than that pool of light projected in front of you. I was using a powerful lamp, so my pool of light was relatively large, but still…

The biggest trouble was yet to come. We had all been forewarned by the Race Directors of the section of trail between the Long Branch aid station and the High Point aid station. (Indeed, the reason I had Kris Wharton’s number in my cell phone was because when I e-mailed her to say I couldn’t make it to the pre-race meeting, she insisted that I call her instead so she could describe it to me in detail.)

It was a three-mile section that, first, sent us up the steepest mountain climb of the day, and then led us right across the rocky peak of the mountain along a route that sent us up, down, around, and sometimes under the rocks and boulders that littered the crest. Even in the daylight, it wasn’t a runnable section. A misstep or a dodge instead of a duck could quickly turn into a 100 or 200 foot drop straight down the side of the mountain.

Now imagine trying to traverse that section after dark.

There were plenty of reflective markers out on the back half of the course. Far more than there were ribbons in the first half of the day. But once on the peak, the route was so twisty and random, that I still lost track of it several times. I had to back track, and slow down and sometimes just stop completely and look around.

Between doing that dance in the dark, and the steep, arduous climb up to the peak, my pace had dropped slower than walking pace. Most aid stations were roughly six miles apart. It was frequently taking me 90 minutes to get from one to another. The 3-mile section to High Point took me 80 minutes to complete.

Twice, though, I did stop completely, flip off my headlamp completely, and try to take in the vastness of the dark world around me on top of Lookout. If I ever go back, maybe I’ll try to run the thing a little faster so I can be up there to see it before the sun is gone.

Race Report: 100kout Mountain - Part Two

REBOUND

A cool thing happened to me after I left the 32-mile aid station at the 100kout Mountain Trail Race, something I’d never really experienced before: I caught a major second wind.

I’ve always read about the sometimes dramatic mood and energy swings that runners get during a super long ultra event, but I’d never been through them. Even in both my 50-milers, what I’d felt was just a long, gradual wearing-down, from strong, to steady, to slow, to trying-not-to-walk-too-much-so-I-can-just-get-to-the-finish.

From mile 26 to 32 at 100kout, I was not doing well. It was during a long stretch of cold rain, and I got caught wearing just shorts and a tech t-shirt. So, I was drenched and shivering and running trails that had often morphed into running streams. In addition, we were gradually winding our way back up the mountain. The switch-back climbs were wearing me down.

I met my girlfriend, Laura at the 32-mile aid station (Covent College). I changed my socks. I changed my shirt to a warmer, long-sleeve, thermal Under Armor piece. I sat for a few minutes and sipped some chicken noodle soup. Then I trudged out on the trail again. My legs were still cold and stiff. But there had been very good news: Covent College was the first aid station of the day with a cutoff time, and I had come in 2 hours under. It was no guarantee for the rest of the day, but it was still a relief. I was past the half-way point, and I had some time in the bank.

Then, less than two miles out of Covent College, I felt a change. It was utterly unexpected, but my legs felt fresher, my chest felt warmer, my back felt stronger, and I said to myself, unequivocally, “I am going to finish this race.” It was the first time that day or in the months before when I really knew that was true.

After limping through the six miles before Covent College, I zinged through the next six miles to the aid station at the Start/Finish line. Seriously, I was almost giggling by the time I rolled down the hill back to the tents and parked cars.

Kris Wharton, the Race Director, had informed all the runners that she would do a personal assessment of each runner’s condition at this station and if she felt you weren’t in shape to continue, she would pull you from the race regardless of cutoff times. Well, I didn’t plan it this way, but I was practically dancing when she found me to give me the once over. In fact, I reintroduced myself and gave her a big kiss on the cheek for the help she’d been giving me over the phone during the morning. She was nothing but gracious and motherly.

My body certainly didn’t feel that good through the rest of the day and night, but I never lost my optimism and I never had any doubts about finishing. It was an uncanny feeling. The kind of thing that makes you foolish enough to try an event like this again some time.

Race Report: 100kout Mountain - Part One

Okay. Time to get back on the horse. It’s only been a little more than 5 weeks since I ran the Lookout Mountain 100K (aka: the 100kout Mountain), but somehow it already feels like months ago. So much has been happening – luckily, none of it bad stuff – but it has kept me from the blog. It seems pointless, now, to try and compose a “full” race report, but given my long-winded tendencies, that’s probably not really a bad thing. Besides, even if my writing has come to a halt, my running hasn’t and there are other things worth writing about now anyway. But I’ll handle old business first.

I’m going to do this with a series of “shorter” posts, because rather than recount the race as a whole, there are several different episodes I’d like to describe or points I’d like to make. So, I’ll offer each with a new post and a header.

Here goes…

WRONG WAY & U-TURN

I had notions of trying to finish my first 100-Miler in 2008. I signed up for the Cascade Crest 100 in Washington State, but when the logistics and expenses of that trip proved too large and difficult to negotiate, I had to withdraw a couple of months before race date. I was unable to find another 100M that fit into my calendar, and I resigned myself to putting it off until another season.

Then in August, I found the Lookout Mountain 100K on a race calendar scheduled for late December. It would be the weekend before Christmas in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and it would be easy to stop over there for the weekend on my way south to Atlanta to visit my parents for the holiday. A perfect consolation race!

So, I could still finish a “100” in ’08, and – though not the 100 Miler I’d originally hoped to complete – it would still rank as the longest race I’d ever run. My work schedule would not allow an ideal training build-up for a 62-mile Ultra, but I decided way back in August, that my finish time wouldn’t matter in anyway.

The only catch was the race would actually have the strictest cutoff time of any race I’d ever run. Start time would be after 7am, and the course would close at 1am that night – less that 18 hours. (By contrast, the two 50-milers I did both had 38 hour cutoffs!)

So, I’d have to be careful and manage my pace to make those cutoffs at each aid station, but still, I’d just run it to finish it. Period. No time goals. No ambition. No pride. Just get to the finish line before they shut the thing down.

And that’s what I did.

The weather wasn’t bad. Temps were in the high 50s all day, but it was cloudy with a chilly, occasional rain that came and went throughout. The sometimes rocky trails were slippery as a result, and, after an early afternoon, hour-long down poor, some sections of the course were more like a muddy creek than a dirt running path. But I wasn’t running for a good time, just for a good time, and it was easy to keep my sense of humor about everything. I had prepared a cheat sheet in a plastic bag with Aid Station names, the miles between them and cutoff times at each, and I just made sure I was staying ahead of those numbers.

They sent us off at the start as soon as enough daylight had dawned to give us a little light. That turned out to be around 7:40 am. It was worth a little wait, though, because we began next to a stunning, raging waterfall that spilled down a rocky ravine and over a cliff beside us to continue on in the river below. The rainy week preceeding the race had only added to the spectacle. (We finally got enough daylight to start the race, but never quite enough to get a good photo of the falls. Oh well.)

It was an impressive way to start. Of course I still managed to have a few misadventures…

About 8 or 9 miles into the race, I was running a beautiful section of the course that followed a hiking trail high along the ridge of the mountain’s crest. The valley below was stunning, filled with clouds and morning fog, and far below. The rocky mountain wall climbed upwards on our right and dropped off sharply down on our left.

I’d finally reached a less precipitous, pine needle-strewn section and had reached a few trail switch-backs, when I looked up to see another runner coming back at me from the opposite direction, an Asian girl in a black cap and red top. Later in the day, she would tell me her name was Lori. She said she’d slipped and fallen off the side of the trail, and though she was fine, she was a little disoriented and, apparently, had started running back the wrong way.

Well, I was not 100% sure that I was going the right way, myself. Everything about the event organization was great except one significant flaw: there really weren’t enough ribbons out marking the course. I will say, there were always ribbons at the intersections, but there were hardly any – and often none – on the long stretches on trail between the intersections. If you’re running a new or unfamiliar course, and run 20 minutes without seeing any ribbons, it’s easy to start doubting yourself, even if you’re pretty sure you made the proper turn the last time you came to one.

I went out on a limb, though, and told Lori I was pretty sure that it was me who was going the right way. I remembered seeing her pass me just before the first aid station, and if she’d been in front of me, it stood to reason that she was the one who had accidentally doubled-back again on the trail. A couple of miles later, when we reached the 2nd aid station, my deductions were validated.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t yet done struggling with the course.

The 3 miles stretch after the 2nd aid station was a gently sloping, downhill cruise on a wide, soft fire road. It was glide-time and peaceful. That is, until I passed a large lodge, crossed a paved road and, 150 yards later, found myself staring at a burned-out wooden bridge spanning a wide ravine below. It completely blocked me from continuing down the trail. How could that be right?

Two other runners had gotten there right before I did; two young, crew-cut blonde guys who looked like (and they were) brothers. They agreed with me. It didn’t seem like this bridge could be a part of the course, but none of us had seen any intersections of any kind on the trail, let alone any course marking ribbons. I hadn’t been able to make it to the pre-race briefing on Friday night, but the brothers had, and they couldn’t remember any talk of a burned-out bridge.

There was a way to cross it – along the edge, outside the railing, on the end of the wooden support ribs – but it seemed a little too precarious to be part of a trail race. We stood weighing that fact against the contradicting fact that we’d been on a single road with no turns for several miles, so how could this not be right?

I looked back up the road to see yet another runner headed toward us and the bridge. My first thought was: Oh good, someone else came this way, too. The more people who came this way, the greater the chance that the route was correct, right? But then I looked again and saw that the runner was Lori, which made me laugh. I told her outright, with a big smile, that I didn’t take it as a good sign that I followed the same direction she had taken.

By extraordinary luck, I had an Ace in the hole – otherwise known as a Cell phone in my pocket. I gotta say; there’re two things I’ve never had in a race before: my phone and the Race Director’s phone number. This time, by grand coincidence, I had both. I had to call Kris Wharton, the RD on the Thursday before the race. Her number was still in my phone’s call log, so I pulled out the phone, looked up the call record and pushed “Send”. And the good luck continued: I had a strong signal here on the mountain, the number was, indeed, Kris’ cell phone, and she answered it after a couple of rings!

“Hello,” I said, “this is Greg, I’m actually running the 100K today, I think I’m lost, and I was wondering if you might be able to direct me back on course.”

It was an unexpected call for her, to be sure. Her first response was a big Oh NO. An RD’s worst fear for a long trail race is lost runners. But when I mentioned the burned out bridge, she knew exactly where I was talking about (the lodge we’d just passed was actually the Ruby Falls tourist attraction), and she was able to given me rather precise directions to get back on course.

The bad news was, we’d gone at least a mile out of the way. Somewhere back up the fire road behind us, we were supposed to have turned left off of that road and dropped down onto a forest single-track trail below. Now we had to backtrack for a mile or more back uphill to get to that turnoff. I thanked Kris profusely and told her not to worry, we were all fine.

As the four of us got moving back up the hill again, yet another runner – the fifth now, including me – was coming down the road past Ruby Falls toward us. She wasn’t really happy when we told her what had happened. In fact, all four of my compatriots were a little down-spirited about the turn of events. Only Lori seemed to bounce back from it relatively okay, but she quickly confessed it was only because she was already planning to drop out at the 38-mile point, when the course took us back through the Start/Finish line.

I wasn’t thrilled either. I’d lost something like 25 or 30 minutes. And when we finally made it back up to the turn off point that we’d missed, I could see that the turn was marked but not in a very foolproof way. (After running 2 miles downhill on a wide fire road, a few pink ribbons on the side of the road at an otherwise invisible trailhead aren’t really enough. Should we all have seen them? Perhaps. But a white sign with an arrow would have been far, far harder to miss. Oh well.) But in spite of this, I kept my good humor and pressed on. It was a marked improvement over my attitude two weeks earlier at the Tecumseh Trail Marathon. I think my modest goals for the day helped me immensely.

Lori and I didn’t exactly run together for the next 17 miles, but for much of that time we remained, at least, in eye shot of each other. She was definitely in good enough shape to run off ahead of me for good, but after two big wrong turns, she was a little gun shy. I couldn’t blame her. We were still running long stretches of what seemed to be the actual trail without seeing any ribbon markings. It was much harder now to just have faith that we were still on the right track between ribbon sightings.

I must say, too, that Kris, the RD, was really wonderful and concerned about us. She actually called me back again – twice – to be sure that we’d been able to find our way back to the trail and then to try and find out from me which other runners had been with us so she could make a note of who and how many had missed the turn.

It made me think: Event volunteers at each aid station are usually in touch with the RD and official staff during an event like this, but they simply can’t be everywhere. It might be a good, standard practice for RDs to dole out their cell phone numbers and for runners to be encouraged to carry their phones during the event. Not just for getting directions to lost runners, but also to get medical aid to runners faster. A runner who takes a serious fall, might normally have to wait for another runner to pass, then for that runner to make it to an aid station, before anyone would even be able to find out that a runner was in trouble. With a cell phone protocol in place, the injured runner themselves would be able to, literally, call for help. In a real emergency, aid might be gotten far more quickly. Just a thought.

Lori & I @ 100kout!

Ok, The fact is, the holidays were wonderful, but very busy, and the past week has been total chaos because I've been MOVING, and I don't think I'm any closer to getting my race report up than I was the moment I finished the race.

BUT: I promised Lori that I would have this picture up for her to take a copy of and I think I've made her wait long enough.

So, Lori, here it is! I hope you, and everyone, had a wonderful New Year.

(More to come...)

Lookout Mountain 100K Results

I'm still working on my Race Report, but for those of you who may be wondering...

I finished! I was 28th out of 37 finishers. There were 65 runners registered and 59 or 60 people who started the race. So that means there were, maybe, 22 or 23 DNFs from the field (38%!). Temperatures were in the upper 50s all day, but the rain came and went, and was often heavy. My official time was 16 hours, 3 minutes and 31 seconds, and I finished just a few minutes before midnight.

I thoroughly enjoyed (almost) every single minute of it, and I'll have the whole story up in another day or two!

Have a happy holiday, everyone! I hope you're all able to enjoy the time with friends and family or anyone else who loves you as much as you love them.

Unexpected Loss

I woke up last Sunday morning needing to head out to run an errand. When I went to retrieve my running watch from the bedstand, I discovered the band ripped in half across it’s width, hanging by just a few resin threads. Destroyed. Worthless. I haven’t a clue why I didn’t notice the carnage when I took it off the night before, but that is when it must have happened.

Of all the running clothes and gear I own, my watch is the one thing that I ALWAYS wear. I have a less equipped back-up watch for emergencies (or unexpected runs), but otherwise, that watch is always with me when I run. As a result, I tend to develop a small attachment to each one I’ve owned – not terribly unlike the affection many people feel for their cars. I don’t personify them, or name them (I don’t do that to my cars, either), but I guess I develop a kind of professional respect for them, as for a co-worker who is constantly tackling projects with me, always quietly holding up their end of the task, and never expecting any of the credit for themselves.

This is the second time that I’ve lost a watch to an inferior resin band. The way the watch is designed, the band is not replaceable; it’s built into the time piece. And the time piece itself, of course, is completely fine and totally operational. In fact, I just had the battery replaced a few months ago, and as far as I know, it would continue to operate reliably for another 10 years, or even longer. I suppose at some point down the road, the buttons would wear out and cease responding to a finger touch, or perhaps I’d take a fall and the crystal face would get cracked – but to have to cast it aside because of the cheap resin band? It feels like having to put down a champion race horse because he fractured a leg as he crossed the finish line.

I’ve only had this watch for two and a half years. It’s a Timex Ironman Triathalon watch (Timex is strangely reluctant to label their watches with specific model numbers.) It was advertised as the “flagship” running watch for the company when I bought it. Ninety-five dollars, 150 lap recall memory, water resistant to 100 meters, memory storage of each workout by date, large easy-to-read display face, etc., etc. Hey, the time piece is a damn fine example of design and technology – but the resin band? (Sheesh.)

I admit, for the first 2 years, I wore the watch every day and all the time, not just on my runs. (Did I mention I get a little attached to my running watches?) Earlier this year, the little loop designed to hold down the tail of the band’s strap cracked and broke off. I took this as a warning flag, bought a secondary watch for everyday use and took to saving my running watch just for runs. So, I guess that earned me another six months.

When this happened before to my previous watch, I was stubborn and kept using the watch in races, carrying it in my hand like a little stopwatch. I have a series of race photos from that stretch where you can see the thing in my left hand as I squeezed the stop button between my finger and thumb. But those were all 5 and 10K road races. It’s not really an option, say, this weekend, when I’ll be running a 62-mile trail race. I’m going to need my hands as free as possible. So, it’ll have to be the bare bones back-up watch for the weekend.

A few years ago, when my previous resin band watch fell apart, I went so far as to call the Timex customer service department. They told me if I mailed it into them, they would repair the band for a $10 fee. What they really did was send back a totally different watch, with similar abilites. At the time, I felt a little betrayed, because they hadn’t warned me that I’d never see my watch again, but the new watch had a Velcro band, and after a few weeks, I realized its vast superiority. Not only would it be more durable over time, it was also far more comfortable on my wrist.

I’ve already made that call to Timex again and they still offer the same service. It’ll be a $10 “repair”, and I can also request that they, once again, sent back a similar watch but with a Velcro band. They told me the turnaround time should be 3 to 5 weeks. I’ll try it again and see what I get back, but I fear the result will depend on the charitable decision of whichever repair tech opens up my shipment – and whatever product they have available to send me. I guess it’s worth $10 and a month’s wait to find out.

But if they send me something inferior and I’m forced to buy another, brand new watch, there’s absolutely no way I’ll be buying another resin band. My faith there is broken. Broken like a cheap resin watch band.

Race Report: Tecumseh Trail Marathon 2008

I am a little late with this, and I know at least a few of you have been waiting. Well, it is Tuesday, and the race was last Saturday. If we just forget the week in between (when I was swamped at work), then I'm actually pretty much on my regular schedule with this post....
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OK. It’s been a long and arduous week. I’ve had worse work weeks – believe me, I have – but the hours were very long and the problem solving was an hour to hour exercise. It just didn’t leave me any time to craft my Race Report for the Tecumseh Trail Marathon.

I’ll be honest, though, I also wasn’t overly enthused to write about it, because I wasn’t overly enthused about how it went. It was a frustrating, weary afternoon, and regardless of all the factors involved, I just didn’t feel like I did as well as I might could have. (“might could”: that might sound poorly written to some of you, but trust me, it’s a legit and vital southern phrasing.)

First of all, the weather was not kind. The forecast all week had called for the temperature to start in the upper 20s and hover around 30 for the afternoon, with, roughly, a 30% chance of show flurries. Well, that weren’t what we got. When I woke up in my hotel room on race morning, I discovered that the damp precipitation from the day before was frozen over, and a half-inch of snow was already on the ground. Temps were still in the teens and wouldn’t rise above 25. There was a steady wind coming in from the Northwest. This was just the beginning of a mild -- but legit -- snow storm that would last the entire day.


Laura had come along for the trip to try and see me a few times on the course and to cheer me on. We had to, first, drive to the Finish Line area to pick up my bib and race packet, and then make the 25 mile drive north to the starting line so she could see us all head off. Just negotiating the roads in the car was a bit precarious. We had to use too many back roads and gravel roads in the middle of rural, west-central Indiana. We didn’t see any salt or plow trucks making the rounds and had no idea if we could expect them. Laura had scoped out both the course map and an area road map and picked out several places where she thought she might be able to see me come by, but I repeatedly encouraged her to choose safety over cheerleading. I was very worried that my little Toyota Celica would hit some snowy, icy patch and she’d wind up stuck in a ditch, far from help.

Honestly, if I’d known what the conditions were really going to be like, I think I might’nt had gone. (Weird words, again, I know, but just trust to my southern stylings…) A year ago, I entered a trail race series at the Rock Cut State Park near Rockford, Illinois. Once every month, through the winter, a race was staged, starting with a 5K, then a 10, a 15, and a 20K finale. The whole thing was well staged and directed, but there was both fresh and old snow on the ground for the race every month. The 15K, in February, was the worst: there were 7 or 8 inches of snow to negotiate. It took me just under 2 hours to cover the slippery, sloggy, hilly 9.3 mile course. I have never, ever been more miserable on a run. Walking on the snow and ice was actually harder than running, so even though I was completely exhausted, a walking pace offered no relief. After that, I swore that I’d never race on snow again. And it wasn’t a post-race protestation, it was a solemn, life-long resolution that I still intend to keep.

Yet, here I was, deceived, along with the meteorologists, by the weather, bracing for another snowy trail race.

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When Laura and I arrived at the start line area, I was doing a decent job of staying positive. There was much rueful laughing about what awaited me, but I was holding onto my optimism. At that point I was much more worried about Laura driving around the area than I was about me running it.

The Start Line was near the Main Office Building in the Morgan-Monroe Indiana State Forest near Cherry Lake, Indiana. The course winds its way east and south from there to the Yellowwood State Forest near Nashville, Indiana. The majority of the runners park at Yellowwood and are bused up, en masse, to Morgan-Monroe so they can run back.

We pulled in more than 30 minutes before the buses. This gave me a chance to duck into a porta-potty without having to wait in a line. (No meager gift!) I wanted to ward off the need for any mid-race pit-stops like I had at Farmdale this year. One big unanticipated problem, though: It was, like, 20 degrees outside. I’m not an astrophysicist, but I believe that means it was near 20 degrees inside the porta-potty, too. I’m also not sure if the hard resin plastic used to mold most toilet seats is an above or below average conductor of heat, but either way, I’m pretty sure that the toilet seat was, also, going to be 20 degrees – and on my sensitive tushieflesh. I imagine all the ladies in the house are now nodding their heads with a kind of emphatic “see we told you so” kind of indignation, but being a dude, this was the first time I had to confront a problem so extreme in a public toilet. Luckily my lady gave me a tip: “If there’s enough toilet paper,” (being a pro at this, she wisely acknowledged that there might not be), “line the seat with it. It helps to insulate.” I’ll be darned if she wasn’t 100% correct. So there you have it, guys: an expert, insider tip from the other half of us who always have to sit to go.

After that, we found an out-of-the-way place to tuck the car and hang out until all the buses showed up. They started trickling in about 20 minutes to 10, and we made our way back up to the starting line. The Race Director was wandering around with a bullhorn making the occasional announcement, and it was about 9:55 when we heard him telling us all that because some of the buses still hadn’t been able to make it up through all the snow, that the start of the race would be delayed for, maybe, 10 or 15 minutes.

That was all fine, except that it was really freakin’ cold! I was not dressed for standing around in the sub-freezing weather. I was dressed for running around in the sub-freezing weather, and I was really ready to get to it! I had developed one of those deep bone shivers that erupt from far behind your sternum and your gut and quake out from there across the rest of your insides. Laura was bundled up far better than I was, but even she was starting to feel the freeze.

It was quite a crowd assembled at the start. The race results show that 516 people started the race. This was, by far, the largest field I’d ever been a part of at a trail race. I think the 50, 100 & 150-milers combined at McNaughton Park only total around 250 runners, at most, and we lesser mortals never see the 150-milers all in one place because they start the day before we do. So, there were lots more people standing around in the snow than I was used to seeing at a race. It makes you feel a little less nuts when you can see just how many other nuts there are in the can with you!

I wasn’t paying attention to what time it was, but finally the RD walked down to the front of the crowd at the actual start line (marked with a line of orange spray paint on the snowy gravel road), and made a few announcements. There were so many people and so much general chatter that, even with the bullhorn, I really couldn’t hear most of what he had to say. Everyone finally piped down long enough for me to hear him remind us all that the trail conditions might be rough out there and to really watch out for each other. Aid stations were all just 2.5 to 3 miles apart at most and to please notify a volunteer if we or anyone we saw was having any trouble.

Then he pulled the squawk trigger on his bullhorn and we were off.

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The first mile and a half was all along a gravel road wide enough for a couple of cars to pass closely by one another. So, there was plenty of room for all of us to find our place in the pack without getting too pinned in behind slower runners and groups.

I tried to hold myself back. Due to my very hectic schedule at my freelance job, I hadn’t been able to go out for a run since Monday. That was four whole days with NO running, and even that Monday was just a gentle 5 miles on a treadmill. Granted, the week before had been a good one: a “taper” week with just 31 miles that also included my brand spankin’ new 5K PR on Thanksgiving Day. But now, through little fault of my own, I had temporarily fallen off the horse. I wasn’t overly worried about this affecting my fitness too much, but I was worried that all the extra rest would leave me feeling so fresh that I’d go out too fast in those early miles.

I’d have to try and hold myself in check without any distance landmarks to follow. I’ve done plenty of trail races without any mile markers on the course, but usually there is something on the course I can measure to; the aid station at the far end of the loop is just before the 5 mile mark, or the 2nd bridge is halfway around the course, or whatever. This way, every 4 or 5 miles, at least, I can check myself.

Tecumseh, though, is a point to point course (as opposed to any kind of Loop course – only the 3rd time I’d ever run a PTP). I hadn’t memorized the distances to each of the aid stations, but even if I had, I didn’t know for sure that they’d be set up where they said they would. It is also my experience that the aid station volunteers don’t generally know where they are on the course, either. (At Farmdale this year, for example, I heard a different answer all 6 times I passed the 2nd aid station.)

All of this, combined with my own inherent folly as a human, and I wound up doing exactly what I told myself I shouldn’t: I went out too fast. Worse: I pushed that too-fast pace pretty much all the way through the first 12 or 13 miles. I passed through an aid station that claimed to be at the 12.4 mile mark in right at 2 hours. That’s a little over 9:30 pace per mile – and that was with a healthy dose of uphill walking (though I was stubborn and didn’t start to take those walks until they started to get really rough around 7 miles in).

A lot of those early miles were on some kind of up or down hill slope. The ups seemed to come in half mile sections and the downs were just as long and loping.

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I think it was about 4 miles in when Tim appeared behind me. I was wearing my 2007 Chicago Marathon jacket for the race. It was the “official” jacket that year, and I consider it to be on the gaudy side – there’s a big race logo on the back with the date below it – and, I don’t know, it just makes me a tad self-conscious to be a billboard like that. BUT, it’s a really, really nice jacket made by New Balance with a fancy fabric they call “BioShield” which has been wonderful for running in the super cold and snow. I bought it last January a few months after the race -- and after New Balance had lost its sponsorship deal to Nike. They put all their dated Chicago stuff on super-sale and I got a $140 jacket for $37. I had to settle for a caramel/gold colored one, but it was still too good to pass up.

Anyway, Tim comes up behind me and compliments me on the jacket. Then he says, “That was the HOT year, wasn’t it?” (Actually I heard that a lot during the day. Half a dozen different people saw my jacket and wanted to talk about Chicago ’07 for a minute.) Tim was really friendly and funny, in a wry sort of way. Mostly, he talked about how under-prepared he was, how he was going to be dropping at 18 miles when he passed where his car was parked, how he was trying out a new training plan: run 10 miles one weekend, slough off the next two weeks, then repeat. He was funny. Dry, wry funny.

He was running with a buddy: Mike. It was easy to keep their names straight in my head because Tim was Talkative and Mike was Mute. Seriously, Mike barely uttered a word for four miles. He was not having quite so easy a time of it as Tim was. Tim, in spite of his protestations, was zipping along at a healthy clip. Pretty much the whole time we were all together, it was like this: me in front, Tim in the middle bantering away, and Mike in the back, quiet as a mouse. All the while, Tim was the engine that was keeping us moving, even though it was me in front.

So, maybe Mike just didn’t have the extra air to spare for speech. But I should have been wiser, because that was definitely one of my problems: I, too, was breathing just a little too hard to carry on an easy conversation. This should have set off a few more alarms in my head, in spite of the fact that there weren’t any landmarks for pace checking, but I just kept trotting and huffing and puffing up and over all those little hills with Tim in the middle, rolling us along.

I did get off one good retort that made Tim laugh out loud (LOL!) hard. He was encouraging Mike, and we were all gabbing (once again) about how tricky the course was today, and I called back over my shoulder, fully in Tim’s wry humor mode, “Hey, the harder it is, the gooder it feels to stop!” Tim laughed so hard I thought he might pull up for just a second to catch his breath. “I think I might have to write that on the T-Shirt I wear at my next marathon,” he told me. “You don’t mind if I use it, do you?” Not at all, my friend, not at all. After all, I now have proof right here on the old Journey Blog that I thought of it myself. (Because no one in the history of time could ever have possibly uttered an obscure phrase like that one before, right? Right? I said, am I right?)

Somewhere, not long after that, during an especially tricky, technical, and icy section of the trail, Tim and Mike actually wound up switching positions, and Mike ended up in the middle of our three-person conga line. He was still quiet though, and Tim must have kidded him about it, because I heard Mike say, “I’m just keepin’ an eye on Greg’s feet so I know where to put my own.” And I swear, not 30 seconds later, just after I scampered across a little downward dip, Mike slipped and went down on his side. I turned around in time to see him pop back up pretty quickly, a little embarrassed but not hurt. The irony was too thick and I couldn’t help it. “Well, Mike are you watchin’ my feet or not?” All three of us had a good chuckle as we continued on.

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At this point, as I recall, we were 9 or 10 miles into the course. We passed though an aid station and then came to another, mostly uphill, section where we got behind some other runners who had started to slow down. Tim and Mike were ready to get a move on, but I was already starting to lag and they ran ahead without me. I knew even then that it was the last time I’d see them.

(Oddly, though, I had a tough time finding their names in the race results. They were both from the Louisville, KY area, but I couldn’t find names on the list that seemed match. I hope they didn’t have trouble. Or maybe Tim really did decide to drop at 18 miles when he saw his warm car.)

For the next twenty minutes, I focused on seeing Laura between miles 12 and 13. The course was supposed to cross over State Route 45 just before the half way point and, on the maps, it looked like it would be relatively easy for Laura to drive in to that spot. But as I neared what looked like it must be the SR45 crossing, I saw a handful of other folks who had driven in to see loved ones, but no little black Celica, and no purple-coated, grinny-faced Laura. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this wasn’t SR45. But no, I could tell by the time elapsed on my watch since the last aid station (which was mile marked) that I was past 13 miles now, and we were headed back off for a long turn through the woods.

So: No Laura. Aannnnd, I was officially worried. Was she okay? Surely, she’d simply encountered one too many closed and impassable roads and decided to take my advice, played it safe, and headed back to the finish line. But there were a dozen other people back at SR45 who HAD made it through. Hmm. What would I do if I got back to the finish line and Laura wasn’t there, either? I had suggested I carry my phone with me on the course in case either of us had a problem, even though I probably wouldn’t get a good signal, but we had opted not to do that. Why hadn’t I just brought it along anyway? It wouldn’t have been such a big deal.

And then I turned a corner on the course and I lost all thought of Laura. We were back on another gravel road and a quarter mile away, straight in front of me, the road turned into a wall that I, literally, could not see the top of because it climbed so sharply upwards into the trees ahead. I can’t remember, but I think I might have started walking just at the sight of that monster. We gained 200 feet of elevation in only 1/3rd of a mile. This is no BS of any kind: I think there were pieces of that hill at a 45 degree angle to the horizon off to our left. I was on it and thinking that exact thing to myself: “Is it? I think it is. No, it couldn’t be. That’s, like, impossible, isn’t it? What car could scale a 45 degree angled incline? It couldn’t be 45. No way. But, like, I think, it IS.” I even held my hand out in front of me at a 45 degree angle to try and compare it to the slope under my feet. “I really think it might be.”

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After that hill, after pushing a little too hard for the first 10 miles, after plowing my way through an inch of snow (and still falling), after far too many icy slopes – I was just cooked. The next five miles were not so much fun. I could feel the weight of my legs. I could feel the effort in my lungs. I could feel the cold in my cheeks. (No, not those cheeks.) The hills started to become a welcome sight because they offered a respectable excuse to just walk.

Worst of all – and I’m taking the blame for this – my mood started to go sour. I suppose there are a host of physiological reasons that contributed to this – lack of sleep and stress during the week, inadequate sugar intake during the race – but really, I just got in a pouty mood about how unpleasant everything was on race day, and I had a hard time shaking my way out of it. I was fully aware, before this race, that I wasn’t really in condition to RACE it. I hadn’t been able to properly prepare for the terrain. This was only supposed to be a healthy, well-supported training run. But I got mad at myself because I just didn’t feel like I was performing well. Even with a gentler pace. Even with lower expectations. Even with a stated goal of just enjoying the experience and trying to stay steady, no matter what the pace. Even with all that, I just felt like the course and the weather and the day had defeated me. Once that thought and that feeling began to sink in, that’s when my mood took a nose-dive.

When I was a kid, I was a swimmer. I was never spectacular at it. I think, just like now with my running, that I was just comfortably a notch above average, but I really loved doing it. There was, though, one winter when, with a handful of my teammates, I joined a winter training league. It was hosted by one of the other teams in the league at an indoor pool on a little college campus 25 miles away. (The Bluefins, I think they were. We were the Stingrays.) A couple times a week, 5 or 6 of us would load up in our coach’s van and we’d bus over to the college to join the workouts. The problem was, the training level was above my skill. I still have crystal clear memories of interval workouts that I was too slow to swim. I’m making up numbers here, but we were supposed to do, say, a 50 second lap, with a 10 second rest at the other end, then dive back in to repeat. Except I couldn’t do a 50 second lap, I could only do a 55 second lap, and by the time I’d lifted myself out of the water, it was time to dive right back in for another round. After a few turns at this, I couldn’t even do a 55 second lap anymore, it’d be a 62 second lap and I didn’t get any rest at all because I was already horribly behind everyone else in the water. It would become maddening and embarrassing, and the frustration was self-defeating. By the end of some of those workouts, I’d be raging and crying all at the same time – a fact I found surreal and unique even as it was happening because I was crying underwater. Even that seemed pointless and redundant.

That whole sensation is still accessible, and I regret to admit I felt a touch of it – just a touch – at Tecumseh.

Somewhere around the 17h mile, a talkative guy turned up behind me. I’d actually leap-frogged him a couple of times in the past 7 miles, and he was always chatting with someone. He finally opened communication with me by mentioning my jacket. I wasn’t really in the most talkative mood but I wasn’t feeling rude enough to blow him off and I wasn’t feeling fast enough to run away from him. He talked about how it was his wife who was really the runner between them and he was more about the cycling. He’d done a bunch of mountain bike races. Running wasn’t really his preference, but he’d done Tecumseh in ’07 with his wife and even though she was nursing an injury this year, he’d wanted to take another shot at it. I know he meant well, but it’s not always the most pleasant thing in the world to be struggling through a race and have someone else come from behind, offer you a story about how little running training they bother to do, and then have to watch them motor off away from you like it’s no real trouble.

The last thing he offered me before disappearing up the road ahead was, “Hey, are your feet wet? Mine are soaked!” At which, I realized for the first time that my feet were soaked and cold. Two things I hadn’t been paying any attention to at all until he kindly pointed it out to me. Now there was nothing I could do about it, except add that to the list of other unpleasantries.

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At the top of the next hill, though, I got a welcome surprise. Laura was parked on a fork in the road atop the next hill in front of me. I stuck my hand in the air to wave at her and she instantly responded. She had the camera out taking pictures and I wanted to run and make a good showing, but the hill she was at the top of was another sharp one and I just couldn’t do it. I got my hug and kiss and she asked if I needed anything from my stuff. “Yeah,” I said, “a fresh pair of socks.”

The bad thing about walking on the course this day – and now, about stopping altogether – was when I slowed my activity, the cold really took over and made me shiver. Sweaty, wet clothes in windy, 25 degree weather is not a good combination. Because of this, I had a lot of trouble getting my socks changed quickly. In addition, all the downhill and elevation changes had been taking a heavy toll on my quads, and even with all the walking breaks, they had begun to develop nagging cramps, especially my right one. Now, just the act of lifting my foot up to where I could reach it caused a charlie-horse so sharp I nearly fell over. Laura had to help me get my own shoes and socks back on. I had to pull my gloves off for this operation as well, and my damp fingers were, somehow, numb and burning in the cold air by the time I was done. Then for the same reason, it was nearly impossible to get my gloves back on again.

Laura had her own tale to tell, of course. She’d missed me at the halfway point because it had taken her almost two and a half hours to get there. I’d run 12 miles faster than she was able to drive it! This had happened because of all the snow on the roads that continued to fall in the area. At one point, she’d made her way, slowly, around to within shouting distance of the SR45 crossover point, only to see a 4x4 truck in front of her hit an icy patch and skid dangerously off the road. She wisely felt that if that guy couldn’t make it, there was no way she should try it in my car. But this roadblock meant backtracking for 45 minutes, almost to where she’d started, to try a completely different route.

By the time she’s gotten anywhere at all, she guessed that she’d already missed me anyway, and decided to take a shot at finding me further along the course. She’d only been at the 18-mile point for about 15 minutes before I got there, and was nervous the whole time that she might have missed me again. There were a good handful of local folks who offered her directions, gave her good advice or even said “just follow me, I going that way, anyway.” To all of those people, Laura and I both want you to know that we can’t thank you enough for your kindness.

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There was another aid station less than a half mile past where Laura had been. I stopped to refill my bottle and grab some cookies. But then I found I couldn’t get my fleece-lined gloves to go back onto my wet hands. I’d already spent nearly 10 minutes at the car with Laura trying to get my shoes and socks changed and now I wasted another 4 or 5 at this aid station wrestling with my darn gloves. Finally, I just gave up and went back to my other, thinner pair. My hands were so bitterly cold at this point that even the thinner ones were hard to put on, but at least it was something.

I made it through the last seven and a half miles on little more than sheer, bull-headed stubbornness. I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing. After all, I think Napoleon may have experienced a similar conviction on his long, failed push into Russia and their unforgiving winter landscape. (Laura! Josephine!) Nevertheless, I did it. Counting down the miles after 20 was comforting, at least. No matter what it’s been like, when I hit the 20-mile mark at a marathon, I always know I will finish.

Around 21 miles, I came across an older guy who, I could tell, was in a similar mental place as I. The volunteers at the 21.5-mile aid station knew him and told him they’d been looking for him. He answered quietly and accepted their good-natured ribbing. I asked him how many times he’d run the race before. “I haven’t missed one, yet,” he answered with a note of pride that was present in spite of the rough day that he (and I) was having. (This ’08 version was the 6th consecutive year the event was staged.) We were on another uphill section, so I walked with him a while as I nibbled my cookies. Just like me, he was dealing with some disappointment that the race wasn’t going too well for him. He wasn’t really happy about it, but he was resigned to it and he wasn’t going to quit. I think he was the one person I talked to all day who seemed to be going through the exact same thing that I was. I liked him. I said to him something that kind of became my internal motto for the rest of the afternoon: “Sometimes,” I told him, “you hit a grand slam deep to the outfield seats and win the game for your team in the bottom of the ninth. And other times, you quietly hit a deep sacrifice fly to the left fielder and drive in the runner from 3rd base in the 7th – but you still win the game. This is just one of those sacrifice fly kind of days.”

I would have stayed with this guy longer, but the walking had cooled me down and I’d caught a case of the shivers again. I explained this to him and he agreed that it might be the best reason left to keep pushing forward as quickly as possible. I told him I figured I’d see him again before the race was over, and I really did think he might catch back up to me, but he didn’t.

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The last 2.5 to 3 miles of the course were run around Yellowwood Lake, and the finish line was on the far side. With a little less than 2 miles to go, while I was making my way over the switch-backs that weaved up and down along the banks of the water, I looked up the trail and saw a bigger, older man wearing blue jeans and a nice leather jacket and a pair of leather shoes. He was with a dark-haired young man who was in his running gear and leaning against a tree. The older man wasn’t wearing a bib either. How did he get here? We weren’t all that close to the finish line. In fact, we were at least a 40-minute hike from there. Where’d this guy come from? As I got closer, I could hear him saying to the younger guy, “Come on, you gotta keep moving. Just keep going forward, it’s not too much farther to the finish.” So, the older guy was talking to his partner like a pacer would, but he wasn’t dressed for running or pacing at all. Everything about this scene struck me as unusual.

It wasn’t until I met Laura at the finish line that I got the whole story. The older guy was the runner’s father. The kid was still in high school, and though he was a cross-country runner, this was his first marathon. While Laura had been waiting for me at 18 miles, the kid’s mother had also been there, looking for her son to come through. She was so worried at the time that she told Laura just about the whole story.

The kid had started the race with the leaders and burned along with them for most of the 1st half of the race. His parents had seen him at somewhere around 8 or 9 miles and at that point he was in 4th or 5th place overall! And then – oh, yeah, you guessed it – he completely crashed. He must have run the first 10 miles in just a little over an hour! (I’m guesstimating, here.) When I saw Laura at 18 miles, the race was a little more than 3 hours old, and at that point, the kid wasn’t too far in front of me. So, he clocked ,maybe, 70 minutes for the first 10 miles, and then just under 2 hours for the next 8. Poor kid. Apparently, his mother was in a bit of a panic over it all, worried that something drastic had happened to her son after they’d seen him doing so well early on.

To his immense credit, though, the kid wasn’t giving up. Not completely, anyway. But he was having enough trouble – and going slowly enough – that somewhere in those last 8 miles, his dad had decided that he wasn’t going to let his son endure the end of the race by himself. And so, even though he wasn’t dressed for it, and even though he didn’t really seem to be in shape for it, he joined his son on the course to keep him moving and get him to the finish.

That’s a damn good dad.

I saw them at the finish line, along with the mother who I recognized from mile 18. The kid did finish. He learned a really difficult lesson, but he finished. He’ll grow up and spend the rest of his life thanking his dad for that.

We don’t run these things alone. We never do. Even when we think we’re alone, we never are. There’s always someone out there who loves us, and every now and then, that’s the one thing that gets us through.

_________

The end was a bit anticlimactic for me. We left the single track for the last time near one last, lonely aid station with one small table of fluids and a single volunteer who assured us that we had just one mile left to run. We did that mile on the gravel road that Laura and I had driven in on hours before, but naturally, it seemed longer now. There was a couple not far in front of me, and as I came up behind them, we all ran past a hunter in his pickup prepping and loading his hunting rifle. It was an unexpected sight, especially so close to the racecourse and the finish line. I could see the couple in front of me having the same silent reaction to it that I was. When we were out of earshot of the hunter, I called up to the guy in front of me, “I guess that’s how they handle any runners who turn up lame during the race.” He laughed really hard, but his wife/girlfriend had to ask him to repeat what I’d said.

I did my best, at least, to jog in the last ¾ mile, and mostly succeeded. Once I reached the top of the parking lot where the finish was, I started seeing a handful of the runners who’d passed me in the last 6 or 7 miles. Everyone mostly just looked relieved.

Right at the top of the finish chute, maybe 40 yards before the line itself, there was a violent dog fight happening. Just some people with their pets on site whose dogs had decided to completely go at each other. There were actually three dogs involved, but just two directly in the brawl and the bigger one was viciously chasing the smaller one. It was not a rough, friendly tussle, but a very serious one, and there might already have been blood. I’ve only seen animals fight like that in person a couple of times before.

There were, at least, half a dozen people swirling around the edges of it trying desperately to keep the dogs apart without being attacked themselves, and generally failing on both counts. To top the whole scene off, there was a woman, dark-haired, maybe my age, who was standing just off to the side of it all, bent over slightly at the knees, but otherwise frozen in place, who was screaming absolute, bloody murder at the top of her lungs. I’m not kidding, you’d think some horror movie villain had emerged from the ground right in front of her and chain sawed her boyfriend in half right before her eyes.

This was all happening just 20 feet to my right as I passed by and crossed the finish line where someone on a PA read my bib and announced my name to the small crowd huddled around the end of the chute.

Did that really happen?

My official time: 5:14:36. Not pretty.

Laura was at the finish line, among that small crowd. I was happy to see her, but all I really wanted to do was just get the heck out of there. The hot soup and sandwiches offered by the race were great, but I just wanted to grab a little of it, get back to the car, change into some warm clothes and hit the road for the long drive back to Chicago. That’s pretty much exactly what we did.

There was one last fun thing about the day: The little back roads we had to follow as we worked our way northward toward Indianapolis took us through a little town called Morganton. We’d wanted to find somewhere to stop and sit down for a hot dinner, but we figured we’d see a Denny’s or an Applebee’s somewhere once we’d gotten back out to US37. Then we made a turn in Morganton and drove past a little place near the modest town center that said “Kathy’s Café.” I said, “Hey, you wanna stop there and see if it looks any good?” Laura and I had good luck on a similar stop, over the summer in middle Illinois, on our way back from Staved Rock State Park. Well, Kathy’s Café was amazing. Just a little family owned place with homemade fried chicken, and barbecue, real mashed potatoes and green beans (unlike the freeze-dried, reheated stuff we’d been served at a Denny’s the night before) and a slice of hand-made peanut butter cream pie that might have made Laura’s whole weekend. Jackpot! If I ever find myself within 30 miles of Morganton again, I might just have to find my way back to Kathy’s Café for a meal.

So there you have it. Not one of my best days. And, unfortunately, it didn’t make me feel too great about my upcoming 100K over and around Lookout Mountain, now just days away. But I survived. Every snowy, icy, surreal, arduous moment, I survived.

On the Trail Again...

I'm headed south a little later today to Bloomington, Indiana for the Tecumseh Trail Marathon tomorrow. My expectations are modest (for myself, I mean).

It's only been a month and a half since my Fall marathon season ended, but I did keep up with my training and built back up to an 18 mile long run a couple of weeks ago. However, the last two weeks I've been swamped with work. Mostly, this has just been affecting my mental preparations. This week has been especially rough. Not only have I barely been able to think about the marathon, I've also been unable to find time to make it out for a couple of shorter tune-up runs during the week. (If I'm missing runs, you know I've been busy!)

But really, it's not a race for me tomorrow. The goal, all along, was to use Tecumseh as a final training run for my first attempt at 100K on the 20th in Chattanooga. I'm not trying to set any land speed records. I just want to stay steady and strong to the finish line, for both of these next two races. Both courses will be new to me, both offer plenty of elevation changes, and both should be good experiences all around.

I'll be content just to finish in less than 5 hours tomorrow, but I'll aim for 4 1/2. If that works out, then I'll consider it all a complete success.

Hopefully the forecast for snow will just hold off a day!