More is Different

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...

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. ...

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. ...

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...

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...