More is Different

With March's  Graveyard 100  casting a lengthy backwards shadow over my winter training, I've been seeking out extended flat runs to ready myself for this test along the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  Dead-level running hour after repetitive hour poses special challenges, mental and physical.  I am fortunate to live close to the perfect venue for this sort of exercise: the C & O Canal Towpath, 184 magnificent miles along the Potomac, from Georgetown to Cumberland, MD. Last Saturday's plan was to sample 36 of those miles, starting at the Dickerson Conservation Park, a little north of my usual starting point at Riley's Lock or Carderock.  My hope was to keep above the snow/sleet line that tends to snake unpredictably across the middle of our state, and so avoid any hypothermia-inducing cold rain.   There was also the excitement of a running a portion of the path I haven't seen before. Pulling out of Dickerson, I am slapped first by a hissing sleet. ...

A week away from the winter solstice, I set out on a 5-hour run, up and down the white-, yellow-, blue-, and purple-blazed trails of Sugarloaf Mountain.  Sugarloaf is a monadnock, a compact oasis of rock and tree surrounded by farmland.  Scarcely a mountain at 1282 feet, some of Sugarloaf's quartzite-littered climbs are as steep and rocky as you'll find anywhere--high enough to create a distinct microclimate with its own peculiar mix of flora and fauna (chestnut oaks among the former, rattlesnakes and copperheads among the latter). From where I live in Maryland, the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia are just a little too far to drive for an ordinary weekend long run.  So, at just 50 minutes from DC, and less than that from my home in Silver Spring, Sugarloaf has become my default mountain, the place where, for better or worse, I prepared for the rocks and the verticals of Grindstone. I love watching the mountain change through the seasons. My last time up ...

First night and first mistakes    Our preparations and planning finally complete, the tents pitched and the pre-race briefing over, we set out about an hour before sunset.  Most of us felt, I suppose, as I did: relieved to be moving at last, well-rested, maybe even a little giddy. Darkness came on swiftly.  For all its immense distances and elevation changes, the first twelve hours of this race are weirdly intimate.  Just you, the rocks underfoot, the dark trees, and your little bubble of light, bobbing after other little bubbles of light.  The first mountain, Eliot's Knob, brings a welcome if challenging break in routine: a steep open gravel road with wide views of stars blazing overhead and the far lights of Staunton twinkling down below. The miles passed.  Crawford Mountain, Dowell's Draft, and on towards Hankey Mountain, Lookout Mountain, Grindstone Mountain, and finally the endless climb from Chestnut Ridge to Little Bald Knob. ...

What do you do the week before a 100 miler in the mountains?  Not much.  Short runs.  More sleep.  Avoid stress. Try not to look too often at the extended weather forecast (looks good right now, but with a bizarre discrepancy between weather-underground and weather.com...stop!)  Find something to do with all that "extra" energy you would have used up in early morning runs or weekend long runs.  I was almost giddy with it this morning. Also important, if hard: don't second guess your training.  What has worked for me for the past 4 (injury free) years has been a 3-day/week schedule (the runs tend to be long).  I've done marathons, 50 milers, and 100s on that schedule.  And faster than than I was running the previous 5 years.  I recommend this to over-45 runners in particular.  But there's always that little voice, getting a bit louder before a major event like this, suggesting maybe a 4th or a 5th day would have helped.  May...

For all the meticulous planning that goes into an event like this, you would think I might carefully read the directions posted very clearly, very explicitly, on the race site.  Mandatory 8 hours trail work .  Do it before September 1 or your entry is forfeit.  This rather crucial detail escaped my notice until sometime during the past week, so early last Friday morning, I set off from Maryland to Camp Shenandoah for a day of trail work and a 29-mile training run the following Saturday.  Both were more than worth the pre-dawn, three-and-a-half hour trip. The weather cooperated and work was a blast, despite or maybe because of the challenging tangle of branches and downed trees that had been dumped on the trail, courtesy of this past summer's "derecho" winds.  Our team performed brilliantly.  We worked under the watchful eye of our fearless leader, Daren Marceau of North Carolina--and I say fearless more than metaphorically.  As the rest of us ba...

( My 2014 race report is available here ) The Hype Heading into my first Catoctin 50k, I read all the reports. The rocks, the heat, the lack of tolerance for sniveling, whining, whinging.  True, all true.  So how to do a race report without falling into the covert complaining trap?  Here goes.  And I'm really more than half serious, too. Festival of Rocks Yes, they are with you the whole way. Big dry boulders to hop across. Wet slippery boulders in the stream crossings.  Little pebbly rocks that move around underfoot, usually in unexpected directions. Football-sized immovable rocks that do not not move, that crowd together and keep you constantly off-balance, that seek out and bruise any unprotected area of the foot.  An infinite variety of rock types. But the technical demands of the Cactoctin trail are not unrelenting.  There are sections of a good 30 to 40 yards where the terrain levels out and you can really open things up and get i...

The 10.8 K course, which they seem to change up every other year, is just plain fun.  First in the Blue Crab Bolt series, it takes place on trails in the Clopper Lake area of Seneca Creek State Park in Maryland.  I know these woods well, but normally experience them at the 4 or 5 hour mark of a long weekend trail run.   For those of us used to covering trails at an ultra-runner's snail pace, flying along these short twisty single-track races at 10k pace is like playing a fast-paced video game.  Rock, root, branch, slippery bridge, TREE.   This soggy, blessedly cool oasis of a July day provided an extra hazard in the rain-slicked bridges, some of which you had to literally stop running and walk on tip toes. (And by you I mean cautious middle-aged guys, worried about twisted knees.) Start out in a field, strung out in a line reminiscent of those high-school cross-country mass starts of yore.   Funnel quickly onto a road that bends ...

Looming ahead in the personal annals of ill-advised adventures is something called the " Grindstone 100 ," which will take place on October 5-6 (potentially to Oct 7) later this year.  More on this monstrous undertaking below. First, a word about the whys and wherefores, and an appeal for your help.  (A link to the online pledge form appears at the bottom of this blog.) The Cause for which I'm running: Fundación Prótesis Para la Vida What has kept me going more than three decades as a runner is at bottom a simple love of movement.  What has fueled the last two years as an ultra-runner is a childlike compulsion I never quite got past to explore the world on my own two feet & see what lies over the next hill.   So it is disquieting to me in the extreme to think how easily mobility can be taken away from any of us at any time. I think of mobility as a fundamental human need as well as a right.  Yet poverty prevents many people from obtaining the prosthe...

I'm calling this an appreciation rather than a race report.  If you want a blow-by-blow, I-did-this-I-ate- that-I-got-this-split-at-AS4 kind of report, there are several good ones out there. Let's start with what was for me the emotional--and I think literal--high point of the race, Aid Station 7.  Pictured is AS7's brilliant crew of volunteers, who obviously love their job, and made mine so much easier.  When you get to this stage of the course, around 30-something miles, you know in your bones why HS40 has been called  "mile for mile, the hardest on the East Coast."   So says David Horton, and that's high praise indeed.  The man knows from hard.  At AS7, you still have the aptly named vertiginous "butt slide" ahead, but you've survived the worst: the 2000 foot climb in the first 8 miles, the subsequent battering descent through rocks where you lose most of that altitude, and the re-climb back up to Aid Station 4.   Sta...

Most of us who run ultras or road marathons have experienced this. An apparently fit runner drops dead in a major city marathon and friends, relatives, and colleagues send you the link with various well-meant, hand-wringing cautions. The latest argument that perhaps gardening or dog-walking would be a saner pursuit than running is a study coming out of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings (not a competitive peer-reviewed journal), and making the virtual rounds in various formats. The upshot of this article is that "extreme" and "chronic" exercise--which for this researcher includes the marathon on up, and any pace faster than 10 minutes a mile--can damage the heart and perhaps shorten, not lengthen, one's life. The instinct for ultra runners is to be dismissive, or say something about the inherent risk of any activity (or for that matter, inactivity). This time was different for me. It prompted some hard thinking. After 30+ years of relatively "normal...