Month: November 2015

Tussey MountainBack 50-mile relay

State College, PA

October 25, 2015

‘So, was MountainBack about what you expected?’  I feared that I may have overhyped it in the days leading up the race.

‘Well,’ Cecily began, choosing her words carefully.  ‘When we started the trip I thought this was just going to be a fun run.’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.  ‘I sold it that way to get you to sign up.’

‘And then it started to dribble out during our ride up that the DCR was actually a pretty seriously competitive event.’  We were taking the scenic way again for our drive home, winding through the rolling Pennsylvania farm lands in the dwindling light.  ‘And then when we met your friends for dinner, I kind of had an Oh Shit moment and realized that I was going to have to run really hard and fast.’

‘I bet the dead giveaway was when I suggested you warm up a lot before your first leg.’

‘But in the end, it was neither of those.  People were so laid back, even though we were running hard.’

‘So you had fun?’  I’d dragged Cecily into this whole shenanigan.  I was still worried she was scarred for life and never going to do it again.

‘Yes!  You know I haven’t run very competitively since college.’  Cecily had been a star 800m runner at Dartmouth, back in the day.  We’d competed together in high school.  ‘It felt like the good ole days of 4 x 800.’

MountainBack this year had its share of highs: pulling my team into the lead on that tough Leg 4 hill; re-taking the lead on the thrilling bomb down Leg 10; throwing my arms around Alex at the finish line, after he’d held onto our team’s lead by the skin of his teeth.  But nothing was more satisfying than knowing that Cecily had caught the magic of MountainBack.  That one race where you run against your friends with the fiercest of competition, running your guts out, whispering taunts, and then share hugs and beers at the end.

This year the DCR had new Commissioners: Cali and CJ.  They mixed some things up: we had the draft just a couple days before the race, to minimize pre-race sandbagging.  This negated some traditions: ordering matching singlets, team names along a theme, the weeks of pre-race trash talk.  But it avoided a key draft problem: injury dropouts and ringer substitutions.

Most of my team this year was newbies.  And, as Sheakowski noted in the MountainBack parking lot, we were the ‘Kid Team’, with an average age that was at least a decade less than everything other team.  Whenever a team wins the DCR, there’s typically an ensuing onslaught of sandbagging accusations.  But the Kid Team didn’t have any clear sandbaggers; everyone just ran solidly.  I took one gamble pick in the 4th round on Andy Bogus, who was a last minute sub and didn’t have much of a bio, and ended up churning out a clutch run up the killer Leg 11.  Drafting by phone is always a challenge.  You have no idea who’s been picked already.  You don’t have a chance to meet any of the new people.  But as Cali was listing off the folks still remaining in the 4th round, I yelled into the phone ‘Give me Bogus!’

The DCR was made more complex this year by the fact that every team had a different leg order.  So you had a lot of mismatches: captains running against 4th round picks on Legs 5 and 11, last-round picks against 3rd-round picks on Leg 2 and 8, etc.  So there were likely to be a lot of lead changes.  Patrick shot the Kid Team out to the lead on Leg 1, and we were in the lead for a larger percentage of the race than any other team.  At various times the Pink team (Costas’s team) and the Orange team (Zimmerman’s team) took the lead.  But on Legs 4 and 10 I managed to wrestle it back, and give Andy and Alex enough cushion to hold off Mike M, Zimmerman, Ken, and everyone else on their heels.

This was my 11th consecutive Tussey MountainBack relay, and my 9th consecutive year of DCR (for more information on the elaborate Draft Challenge Relay, see blog posts from prior years).  But my first DCR win.  We also won the Standard Men’s division, which was a larger number of teams.  But we all know that the only thing that matters is how you stack up against the other DCR teams.

Overall, I liked a lot of things about the new Cali/CJ DCR.  Thank god I don’t have to buy another stupid singlet I’m never gonna wear.  And the lack of last-minute substitutions kept the competition a lot more fair.  No one can really hurl the customary sandbagger accusations at the Kid Team.  We just had a good strategy: (a) stack our front end on Legs 1/7 and 2/8 with speedsters Patrick and Cecily of Penn State men’s soccer and Dartmouth track team fame, respectively; (b) ask Dana to do his best to keep us in the race on Leg 3/9, knowing that he’d be running against runners picked higher in the draft order but if he kept us within sight of other DCR runners, the marmot’s competitive instincts would kick in; (c) sure enough, dangle some DCR headbands in front of me and I’ll track them down on 4/10, Taiwan jetlag be damned; and (d) count on Bogus and Andy’s pure toughness to clutch onto shrinking leads.

Going into Leg 10, I informed my team, ‘Now guys, you all made me work damn hard on Leg 4……’  Catching Meira and Costas on uphill legs had been grueling work.  My training involves neither (a) speedwork or (b) hills, so MountainBack is always a hard jolt to my system.  ‘So you all are going to give me a nice cushy lead on Leg 10.’  We’d been in the lead since the top of Leg 4, and a nice float down Leg 10 seemed like an apt reward for heaving my lungs out on Leg 4’s steep hills.

‘Chri-kies,’ I muttered as the Orange team came into view.  Pink team was right on our tail.  They were going to make me do it again.  And if we were going to win the DCR, putting us in the lead wasn’t enough.  With mismatched legs coming up, I had to give Bogus and Alex a couple minutes of cushion.  As I went by an ultra runner, he yelled, No one else running like that out here.  My hamstrings would be sore for more than a week.  But I gave the Kid Team the last push it needed.  Bogus held tough on Leg 11, a monster performance for a 4th round pick.  Alex put it all out there on Leg 12.

My fears about the Kid Team had been vanquished.  That Bogus, in his baggy pajama pants and oops-I-got-lost-mountain-biking-yesterday-and-did-way-too-many-miles had no idea what he was getting into on Leg 11.  That Cecily would hate me forever for dragging her into all this.  That I’d be crawling after a long, sleepless trip to Taiwan and back.

As Cecily and I drove home to DC, I found myself admitting that a side of me still very much misses State College.  We had been there less than 24 hours, but it was enough for her to know exactly what I meant.  It might be tough to find a decent Ethiopian restaurant in the Happy Valley.  Or catch an Ariel Pink concert.  Or race with 45,000 people around the Mall.  But there’s a coziness, and an ease of living.  The way everyone was able to convene impromptu for happy hour at Toftrees (if we want to do something with friends in DC we have to plan weeks in advance — there’s no just scootin’ across the city).  The way the shoe guy at Rapid Transit, Brock, knew who I was and had shared friends, and helped me and Cecily sort through the entire basement of clothing racks to find just what we were looking for.

And of course how can we omit Luna and his wonderful doggies and garage apartment?  Sure, this year we had to contend with a lot of mouse poo (seriously, Luns, we got to get Leda in there).  But what’s MountainBack without a shower that ends with accidentally smearing mouse poo all over your wet body (as it turned out a little mouse had found the warm wrapped towel a delightful place to relieve himself)?  If there had been a live feed of Luna’s apartment the night before MountainBack, you would have seen me and Cecily shrieking and laughing, as I had taken a blanket from the upper reaches of the closet (‘no way a mouse could get all the way up there,’ Cecily had assured me) and thrown it onto my bed, sending pellets of poo flying in all directions across the apartment.  After scraping up all the pellets, we determined that one bed was 100% poo free, and Cecily and I tucked in together under the sheets.  Because friends don’t let friends sleep in mouse poo.

Most of these photos were kindly provided by Judd Michael.

‘I’m done.’  I whispered in Aaron’s ear.  The sun shone wide across the blue sky, and the fall air was crisp and calm.  It was perfect weather for a long day of trail running.  My eyes were tearing but my mouth was smiling.  ‘But walk with me, Bear.  I gotta find a place to scratch some leaves.  And quick.’

My legs had no interest in quitting.  They’d held up well over the 27 miles I’d covered.  Despite my abdominal organs all conspiring against me, I hadn’t actually lost any time on the lead woman.  But I had a clear intention for the Stone Mill 50m.  I wanted proof-of-concept that I could run 50 miles like a fat-ass: easy, uncompetitive, and just covering the miles no-drama.  As if it were Catawba.  Or the Teton Crest Trail.  A long day on the trail with friends and critters and without any parties in the stomach.

But by mile 17, where I met Aaron at the aid station, it was clear that my vision was unattainable.  Sometimes your race happens to fall on the wrong day of the calendar.  I have one day each month where I’m immobile.  If I take the day off from work, take a steaming hot bath with an overdose of prescription pain killers (up to the equivalent of 3200 mg of ibuprofen on particularly bad days), and curl up in a ball, I survive the day.  It’s hard to eat, but I force feed just enough to be able to take the heavy painkillers.  The pain comes and goes in waves, and sometimes if I take a short jog during a ‘good’ wave I can feel a little better.  Get the circulation moving the blood around.  But it’s not a day to race.

Maybe I was a little overly optimistic toeing the line at Stone Mill.  The timing of things was such that I knew that the first bad wave was coming.  But bodies are curious, and sometimes the body’s Schedule of Events doesn’t flow quite like clockwork.  Maybe I’d get lucky.

Luck is a funny thing.  As Aaron and I walked out of the Mile 17 aid station, I found a four-leaf clover on the side of the trail.  I screamed words of exultation that I hope no children overheard, I danced, I hugged Aaron.  The draught was over.  I’d been afraid I wouldn’t find another before winter set in.  After several months with no four-leafed friends, I had started to consider what I might have done to offend them.  True, it had been a very busy fall, with so much travel that I hadn’t once made it out to West Virginia to see the Sodds in their flaming fall colors.  West Virginia is where I go to put the pieces back together, and stop the rattling.  And rattling brains are not so likely to find clovers.

Whenever I tell people that I find clovers all the time, their first response is ‘Lucky.’  Sometimes I just nod and smile.  But if the mood strikes, I’ll point out that the only people who think clovers have anything to do with luck are the people who rarely find them.  Yes, I’ll admit that clovers do have something to do with serendipity, and the stochastic nature of life.  That the world is not as controlled as we’d like to think it is, and that low probability events have outsized effects on human existence.  But most of all, clovers signify the beauty of mutants.  That in any population there will be certain creatures that just fall outside of the charts.  And trying to homogenize them will bring only misery.  And, at a broader scale, that we are all unalike in our own little ways, and happiness is attainable only when you can still cherish people even when you don’t have foggiest idea how they can think the way they do.

It occurred to me that my little Mile 17 clover might turn my race around.  I had drunk an entire Ensure.  Holly had given me some Tums. (I had wanted to tell her that my problems were so much bigger than Tums, but she was so sweet about it.  And pain makes me taciturn.)  Hope was also buoyed by the way that the pain always goes in waves.  There were moments I felt invincible.  But then the good wave would always recede into a bad wave, and the reality sunk in: today was a day when I should be curled up on the carpet with a pile of blankets, not trying to cover 50 miles.

It occurred to me that Aaron might try to make me push on to one more aid station.  I resolved that if he wanted me to not quit at 27, I could push on to one more aid station.  I certainly didn’t want to, but I trust his judgment.  But Aaron is a smart bear.  He knew that if Stone Mill had been a priority race for me, I could have sufferfested to the finish.  He also knew that it was his job to nudge me on if he thought I was just going through a temporary bad spell and there was a chance that my race might turn around.  But he recognized that neither of these scenarios were true.  He also knows that I have proven multiple times that I can sufferfest to the 50-mile finish line.  Proving that again is pointless, and I would take no pride or joy in it.  It would only leave me with one more bad taste in my mouth and one more notch in the number of miserable ultra experiences I’m willing to tolerate before I throw in the towel and refocus on marathons and road races.

I rolled around on the carpet in pain for a while when we got home, happy that I had quit before things had gotten too bad.  I was uncomfortable, but it would have been so much worse if I’d made myself finish.  And I know what worse means: today was nothing compared to the aftermath of the NAF half marathon, where I’d missed my flight to Mexico.  I tried to have my post-race deconstruction talk with Sean, but my stomach wouldn’t allow it, and partway through I had to hang up.  I’ll still never forget the way he put an icepick in the wound when I dropped in my first Highland Sky at mile 32 (‘What?? You only had 8 miles to go.  You could have just walked it.’)  I wish I’d known then what I know now: that Sean is a mixed bag of sometimes gutting out the ugliest of times, and sometimes just dropping because the winds are wrong.  Earlier in the day, Holly had been telling me about having to drop at mile 97 at Massanuttan because of asthma that made her husband fear for her life.  At the end of the day, everyone who runs trails for long enough is going to have their own goodie bag of drops: the drops that were medically forced on us, the drops that we could have pushed through but didn’t feel like it, the drops that still eat at our hearts because we know we should have done differently, the easy breezy drops that mattered less than that time you forgot to scoop the cat box.

When I was feeling better, Aaron and I had a bit of dinner.  I ate my food eagerly.  I was in a surprisingly good mood for having had such a crap race and rough day.  ‘This is the first time,’ I declared, feeling a change stirring in me that I hadn’t felt before.  ‘Growing up, if I had a bad race, you know how that would’ve gone.  By dinner time Bob would still be dissecting it, piece by piece, where it went wrong, where I erred.  It would go on for days.’  I cradled a pile of string beans on my fork and scooped them into my mouth all together.  ‘You have to recognize how different this is.  Finito.  Move on.  Shit happens.’  I shook my head, marveling.  ‘Thank you.’