More is Different

This is a race report about a race that wasn't.  Not for me.  As of this writing, it remains to be seen whether the 2013 Grindstone 100 will happen for anyone. Last Tuesday, 2 days ago, we learned that the race was suspended.  Although the George Washington National Forest is open (a Forest is not a Park, you see), as a specially permitted event, the race needs to be supervised by USPS personnel--who, like most of the other 800,000 furloughed federal workers, are not allowed to so much as answer a work-related email while the government remains shuttered. Getting off the grid  What I will miss. There is nothing in my experience like the moment just before the start of an ultra.  All the better if the huddled souls at the starting line are few, the location remote, the terrain rugged.  Better still if shadows are beginning to lengthen and the trail appears to disappear into the darkness of trees and mountainside.  A chill in the air doesn't ...

Fireflies at 5AM I've seen some online kvetching about The North Face's decision to start the DC 50 miler just before dawn.  There are maybe 40 minutes of darkness before twilight, so why not just start at 6AM?  Adding to the annoyance of some, TNF race rules list as "mandatory" the possession of a flashlight or headlamp (although in three goes at the DC 50 miler, I've never seen anyone pulled out for not packing light). Yet it makes for a magical first half hour.  You start out loping around a cool, dewy, grassy field.  There's a line of lights snaking ahead and behind, weaving and bobbing through the darkness. Then on to the Potomac Heritage trail, plunging into the tunnel of trees, following the dangling glowsticks around the early twists and turns.   Out into the "lowlands" area, through long grass, marshy, nettly country.  The sun comes up by then, breaks brilliantly across the river to the east and south. Frogs in a slow boil The m...

Among the time-wasting diversions that parade daily through my virtual life are updates from a site called "Trail Porn."  TP serves up big glossy high-res images not of naked people doing naughty things on trails but of impossibly gorgeous locations around the world for running or hiking.  People, naked or otherwise, are beside the point.  Typically they are lost in the landscape like figures in Chinese paintings of terraced mountainsides.  Sometimes the landscapes are empty, human presence implied only by thin ribbons of single-track snaking into the wild.   Most TP images depict mountains or deserts.  Space, solitude, and a red ochre color palate are recurring themes. Western States figure prominently--dunes in Oregon, canyons in Arizona, mountains in Colorado. Other locations are, for a North American viewer, more exotic.  A curving passage through the Razorback in the Australian Victorian Alps.  Or...

Straw Sandals Among the many evocative black-and-white photographs that grace this wonderfully strange, if not entirely satisfying, book is the image of a row of straw sandals, hanging illuminated in the darkness.  They look unpromising as protection for the feet, less like shoes than elongated birds' nests held together by bits of string.  Yet these are the sandals worn by the gyoja , the so-called "marathon monks" of Japan, as they run the rocky and frequently rain-slicked paths on the five peaks that make up the mountain complex of Mt. Hiei. One pair of sandals suffices, under ideal conditions, for perhaps a single day of running.  Conditions are frequently not ideal in this part of Japan.  And the gyoja will run far more than a single day at a stretch. In heavy rain, the straw sandals disintegrate in a matter of hours.  So something seems seriously amiss with the figure of 80 pairs of sandals that Stevens tells us is allotted to each monk per 100-day...

One of the reasons some of us have taken our running permanently offroad is the spirit of shared athletic adventure to be found in trail races, ultras in particular.  Competition can be had, of course, if you want that sort of thing, but there are times competition with others, or even with oneself, feels almost beside the point.  You are just out there, alone and with others, part of a shared festival of running, a figure moving through a landscape. This at least is what I'm seeking, and nowhere have I felt the sense of shared endeavor and adventure more strongly than in the 12- and 8-hour trail races--held in September and February, respectively--that are part of an annual cycle of well-organized DC-area events put on by Alex Papadopolous and the folks at Athletic Equation.  (There is a 24-hour version, as well, which I have not run.) Billed as a "paradigm shift," these races allow you to run as much or as little as you like for a set period of time.   The c...

This mid-section of the mid-Atlantic state in which I live serves as a vast drainage area, sloping from the Blue Ridge and Appalacian areas in the west to the flat coastal plains in the east.  A map of the MoCo (Montgomery County) watershed looks like the capillarized cross-section of some vital organ.  As I suppose it is. Today's planned 6-hour run begins in a dense early morning fog at the small parking area in front the ruins of Black Rock Mill.  I am here, not the trailhead at Riley's Lock, where Seneca Creek flows into the Potomac, because with the soggy past week we've had and warm, almost spring-like January day, parts of the lower lying portion of the Seneca Greenway Trail will likely have turned to bog.   For the first half hour, I move slowly, warming up the legs and picking my way carefully along the muddy track.  River and forest are wreathed in fog.  The air is damp, cool but not cold--not a typical day for January.  Along t...

This low-key trail race takes place early every January in the northeast corner of Maryland, just miles from the border with Delaware and Pennsylvania.  It meant an early start and a 1 and 1/2 hour drive from Silver Spring.  Not so bad.  Since the race begins at a leisurely 9AM, I had time to eat and digest a good breakfast, get a quick shot up an unusually empty 95 North, and enjoy the sunrise while crossing the Susquehanna.   I was one of the first to arrive.  I dropped off my canned goods for the food drive, handed over my contribution for the aid tables, and did a little early exploring of the trails. Elkton and Fair Hill NMRA sit at the head of the upper eastern shore of the Chesapeake, but the terrain in this area is not part of the flat sandy coastal plains area of Maryland.  The twisty, hilly, stream-crossed forests and fields of Fair Hill NMRA are part of the same Piedmont Plateau region that includes the trails in my own backyard--Seneca Creek, ...

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 ...

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...

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...