I rolled up to Camp Shenandoah, the start of the Grindstone 100-mile trail race, with my heart racing and a healthy amount of nervous energy. "Excitement is a blend of happiness and fear", somebody once said, and that pretty much summed up what was going through my head. I'd never run 100 miles before, or even tried.
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| Great weather for the race |
After a leisurely set up of my tent, a good lunch, and a thorough pre-race briefing, I'd calmed down a bit and lay down in my tent for an hour or so before the 6PM start. I had all my gear double and triple checked, my drop bags packed and laid out at the appropriate aid stations, and had reviewed the map and aid station distance chart. By the time the start rolled around, I was actually feeling a bit of a drag from sleeping poorly during the two nights prior to the race; my first indicator of things to come.
At the start, I got all my electronics revved up (GPS, heart rate monitor, chronometer) and ready to go. I don't really look at them during races, but they are fun to look at afterwards. The field of about 150 runners took off out of the camp, made a lap around the little pond next to the entrance, and circled back through the back side of the campground. We were off.
I kept the pace very slow in the beginning, walking anything that hinted of uphill and doing a nice easy trot on the downhills. I hadn't gotten in as much training over the summer as I would have liked to due to spending so much time training for and recovering from the Mongolia Bike Challenge, but I felt that if I just took it easy I had enough aerobic capacity and endurance to bull through.
The first climb came and went, with no major issues.We dropped into the first aid station, which I ran through, as I had plenty of food and water. After that came the first big climb on the course, up to the peak of Elliot's Knob, the highest point on the course at just over 4,400 feet. At this point I was running with Mike Hannon, a fellow entrant in the Beast series, and we were both keeping a comfortable pace up the long death-march road climb. It was
steep, and kept going up and up forever. You could see a line of glowing pools of headlamp light trailing off into the distance above you.
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| The space elevator climbing up to Elliot's Knob |
After a long time, we reached the peak of Elliot's knob and punched our bibs with the orienteering punch. After this came a short steep descent back the way we had just came, and then we made a left turn onto a long gently graded downhill. This part was quite nice, as the slope was gentle enough that you could actually run on it. I lost Mike on the downhill, as he was cruising a little bit faster than me. At the base of the descent, we hit the second aid station at Dry Branch Gap. This was only about 15 miles into the course, but I had already been running for almost 4 hours. I was still feeling very good though, and continued to press onward.
Even though I was physically feeling good, I was starting to feel tired. As the hours ticked on through the night, I realized that it was well past my bed time, and became sleepy. I never realized before how much of a difference there is between
tired and
sleepy. Things began to blur as my little bubble of illuminated trail moved on in the dark. I do remember passing Sniper on a really steep climb. He imparted a gem of ultrarunning wisdom on me (as usual), and said that the climb we were going up was called "The Five Bitches of Bangkok" for various colorful reasons which I will not go into here. On the same climb I passed another runner sitting on the side of the trail and asked him if he was OK; he said he wasn't feeling great but was just resting a bit. I later heard that he was having stomach issues and was puking on the side of the trail. Grindstone 1, runners 0.
The delirium was just edging in when I got to the third aid station, Dowell's Draft, at mile 22 around midnight. This was where my first drop bag was located, and so I re-upped my food supply, filled up my hydration pack, and kept going. I honestly don't remember what the next aid station looked like at mile 30, but I do know that I was starting to lose my will to keep going. It was about 3AM, I was tired, and my feet were starting to get sore. Somehow I managed to get out of there.
Between mile 30 and mile 35, I made the decision to drop at the next aid station. I was starting to get blisters on my feet, I was extremely tired, and my motivation was at a sub-terranean low. It was at this point that the Great Orange Hope and the Party Train (AKA Sniper and Max) trotted past me. I hopped on the bus, as they were going at a pace that was within my reach and I knew that they were veterans who knew WTF they were doing.
The party train arrived at the North River aid station (Mile 35) around 4AM, in rough shape. Max seemed to be doing OK, but Sniper had tweaked his leg somewhere, and my stomach was feeling pretty queasy. Sniper and I sat down and chilled out for a few minutes.The next climb was going to be a royal bitch, and nobody wanted to head up it by themselves. Eventually, Max left with another runner. Somehow Sniper and I talked each other into heading out into the dark to climb the hill.
In my head, I knew that the next aid station was only about 8 miles away. However, I don't think I fully grasped the gravity of those 8 miles. This was not 8 miles of milk-run jogging. This was 8 miles of up. And up and up and up. The climb to the top of Little Bald Knob has a few downhill sections along its length, but all told, the ascent is some 2,700 feet of rough singletrack. We staggered up the hill as the sun rose. I remember telling Sniper that I would probably drop when we got to the top, as my feet were really starting to hurt from the blisters that had been beginning to form over the past few miles. I remember him expressing many complaints about lack of energy, yet somehow we kept on moving.
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| Sniper and Darren pulling me up the hill |
Near the top we encountered another runner, Darren, whom Sniper knew (who
doesn't know David Snipes??). I think this, along with the sun rising, lifted both of our spirits, and the three of us trudged along to the Little Bald Knob aid station, which was located in an area that I remember from the Shenandoah Mountain 100 bike race as being called the Thirteen Meadows. At the aid station I sat down for a few moments. I was feeling pretty out of it, and a short break felt good. The other two took off, and I grudgingly got up and went after them.
Darren seemed to be a bit faster than Sniper, and Sniper was definitely faster than me. I hobbled along, with my blisters painfully reminding me of their existence with every step. Sniper kept stopping to talk with people, so I would catch up with him briefly, and then he'd pass me again for a while. We leapfrogged like this most of the way to the next aid station, although the gap between us kept growing and growing. By the time I neared the aid station, the best I could manage was a slow shuffle that didn't even come close to a speed-walking pace. I think it took me about two hours to go the 4.5 miles between aid stations, which is pretty pathetic considering the terrain was very mild, flat, and runnable.
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| The pain was intense, but so was the scenery |
When I limped into the aid station at Reddish Knob, I told the volunteer that greeted me that I had to drop, I couldn't keep going like this. He asked me why not, and told me that I couldn't drop there anyway because there was no way to get back to the start from there. I told him about my blisters, and how long it had taken me to get there from the last aid station. "I'm going to fix you up, man", he said, and proceeded to turn my race around. I sat down in a chair and we took off my shoes to take a look. It was pretty ugly. I had blisters the size of grapes on my big toes, smaller blisters on almost every other toe, and big blisters ringing my heels.
After gently chiding me for wearing shoes that may have been a bit too small, he set about doctoring up my feet. We popped several of the blisters and put moleskin and duct tape on them, and then slathered the whole affected area in Vaseline. They gave me 600mg of Ibuprofen and we put my shoes back on. It was a pretty significant difference - although still painful, my feet no longer felt as though they were going to explode out of my shoes. They gave me some food and water and sent me on my way. This was just one example of how incredibly great and supportive the volunteers at this race were.
I hobbled up to the summit of Reddish Knob up the paved road, about a half mile away, to punch my bib with the second orienteering punch. The view at the top was amazing, but it was windy and I was too tired to really appreciate it. On the way back down to the aid station, I started to trot a little bit, just to test out the repair job. I couldn't go very fast, but I could fake something that resembled running, and that was a huge improvement over my state coming into the Reddish aid station the first time. As I ran past the aid station on the way to the next, I got cheers and thumbs up from the volunteers.
The course took the paved road downhill about 2 miles, then crossed another road and went up a dirt road to the turn-around point at Gnashing Knob. At the turn-around aid station, they had boiled potatoes and a bowl of salt to dip them in, and were making small breakfast burritos. The food was like mana from heaven; it was restoring and delicious. A few sprinkles of rain started coming down as I was about to leave with a group of runners, and a few of us mooched garbage bags from the volunteers to use as emergency ponchos in case it really started coming down. I had left my rain jacket in a drop bag at the Dowell's Draft aid station (mile 22 / 80) because the forecast had said that it wouldn't start raining until about 4AM on Sunday morning.
On the way back down from Gnashing Knob, one of the blisters on my pinky toes popped, which made every step extremely painful. I pulled off to the side of the trail and took off my shoes to put on a bit of the blister treatment I had in my first aid kit. As I was sitting there, a couple runners came by and asked me if I was OK. I told them that a blister had just popped, and asked them if they had any Mole Skin - it turned out they did! Those guys were great - they cut me a square of Mole Skin and gave me some duct tape to attach it to my toe with. Moving on, I slogged back up the hill to the Reddish Knob aid station. My feet still hurt, a lot, but I was able to keep moving. At the aid station, I took on some more Vaseline and the volunteers gave me a small tube of Aquaphor to carry with me just in case. I departed for the Little Bald Knob aid station in high spirits, although at a slow pace.
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| Skeptical about life in general, but having "fun" |
Partway back to the Little Bald aid station, I was passed by a runner and his pacer. She had the pacer thing dialed, keeping her runner moving and motivated. They told me to try to hang with them if I could, because their crew chief at the North River aid station was a genius with blisters and could fix me up real good if I could just make it there. We pulled into the Little Bald Knob aid station as a group, and I asked the volunteers if they had any duct tape that I could use on my feet. This morphed into a 30-minute long medical session, in which my feet were administered to with much attention to detail. They had me clean them off with a baby wipe (good idea), dry them off (good idea), and pull my clean dry socks out of my drop bag (good idea). The carnage was pretty gross, so I won't go into too much detail on how exactly we fixed my feet up, but we basically re-repaired everything that the guy had helped me with at Reddish, as well as the new silver-dollar sized monster that had appeared under the ball of my right foot. After the medical attention, they gave me a hot cup of coffee and the most delicious quesadilla I have ever tasted, bid me good luck, and sent me on my way.
I hobbled on again, headed towards the descent back into North River. I made decent time through the remainder of the Thirteen Meadows, and reached the top of the descent in good spirits. I knew I had about three and a half hours to cover six miles of downhill to reach the aid station before the 6PM cutoff, and once I did that, I would have plenty of time to cover the remainder of the course no matter how slow I was moving.
My optimism quickly faded as I started down the descent. The loose rock and gravel did not provide very good footing, and the lack of big rocks to put my feet on meant that my already battered toes were jammed up against the front of my shoes with every step. I had to use a lot of energy and concentration just to keep from falling on my face. The trail occasionally leveled out, providing a momentary respite and letting me move at least at a brisk walking pace.
The hours passed and I kept going down. And down, and down, and down. At one point, I pulled out my GPS and checked to see what elevation I was at, and was dismayed to see that I still had almost 2,000 feet to go. Eventually I reached the point where the course took a hairpin left turn, and I saw a sign that said "FR95" (the location of the North River aid station) - "2 Miles". However, in my delirium, I thought that it said ".2 miles". Stupid mundane details like decimal places. I should mention that during this whole hellish descent, I was starting to see things that weren't really there as a result of sleep deprivation and fatigue. A spray of pink flowers was definitely a girl's bright pink shirt. That red leaf over there was definitely a cardinal until about three feet away. Those leaves and branches over there are definitely people standing in the bushes.
Needless to say, that two-tenths of a mile that was really two miles took a lot longer than I thought it would. I was crawling along at a snails pace, too; my feet were mostly in agony and my legs were starting to stiffen up from inching down the long steep hill. I hadn't seen anybody in a while. I knew I was getting close to the cut-off time, but I hoped I could make it and re-group myself. I felt sure that if I could just get to an aid station, sit down for a moment, and eat some food, that I would be good to go for a few more miles.
However, it was not to be. The sweepers caught up to me about a half mile away from where the aid station would have been if I'd made it there on time. They stayed a respectful distance back, not bothering me as I hobbled into the parking lot. I gladly took the chair and cup of hot ramen that they offered me. The radio operator radioed into base that I and another runner had made it back, and then a sweeper generously offered us a ride back, as he wanted to watch his friend finish.
Back at camp early (although a good 7 hours after the record-breaking first place finisher had come in), I took the longest walk I've ever taken up to the gloriously hot showers. A good solid 12 hours of sleep ensued, punctuated by cheers as runners came in (including several cat-calls for "Sniper! Sniper!!" around 4AM). I got out of my sleeping bag to a drizzling rain in time to eat the deliciously greasy breakfast (bacon, eggs, sausage, cider, coffee, hash browns, biscuit, and banana pudding) which attempted to fill the vast emptiness in my stomach that burning 10,000 calories had created. The awards ceremony was good, with all the top runners being recognized, and Clark (the RD) giving props to the runners for leaving so little trash on the trail.
I packed my bags, got into my car, and cruise-controlled it all the way back to Baltimore.
This race was certainly an experience. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The course was a monster, but was very beautiful. The people on it were incredible, some of the most supportive and friendly I've ever met. I learned a lot of lessons (lube the feet, sleep better, get a crew, get pacers, more dry socks) and pushed through well beyond the point where I wanted to stop until I had gone further than I had ever gone before. Next time I'll finish.
