More is Different

John Steinbeck said of trips that we don't take them so much as they take us.   Every trip, every journey is its own character, a distinct personality with its own its own wants and its own agenda--"and all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless." I already knew from two previous finishes that Maryland's Catoctin 50K is an ornery character, a diabolically rock-littered roller-coaster of an ultramarathon--held, just for good measure, in the soggy heat of late July.   It doesn't even respect the 50K distance, growing a bit each year through erosion and trail changes to its current 33-point-something length. This time I would also learn that the Cat is entirely unimpressed by any "experience" I might have gained in two previous finishes.   Or with my careful planning and strategizing.   Cats have their own prerogatives and don't care about yours. Old stones The race starts where it ends, at Gambrill Park in front a...

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...

A Review of Peter Nabokov,   Indian Running, Native American History & Tradition .  Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1981. For better or worse, Chris McDougall’s Born To Run has ensured that the Tarahumara will never again enjoy the status of a “secret” tribe of running prodigies hidden in the canyons of Mexico.   Some twenty-five years before McDougall’s bestseller, Peter Nabokov also wrote about the Tarahumara’s running prowess. He presents them not as freakish extremes, but as part of a continuum, one expression of a long tradition of Indian running that extended across two continents. Nabokov invites us to imagine North and South America before the arrival of Europeans as a New World of runners.  From the Arctic to what is now Argentina, the landscape is networked by countless thousands of trails, paths, and roads.  The network extends through the deciduous forests of the Northeast, across the great plains of North America, through the mountains and ...

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, ...