I ran home throwing my bags on the floor, ripping off my jacket layers (it was hovering around freezing, which meant I had at least 3 jackets on).

‘Aaron!’

‘Yes, medium boo.’

‘You have to listen!  I listened to one of your ultrarunning podcasts and….and…there was a coach who was SANE.’

Aaron turned me on to the ultrarunner podcast a couple months ago, and I’ve enjoyed listening to 4 or 5 of them so far.  It certainly has a west coast bent, and most of the people and races I’m not familiar with, but I did really enjoy the Brian Rusiecki interview, not only because he is an adorable person but also because he discusses things we’re all familiar with like ‘Horton Miles’, Escarpment, etc.  But there was one interview that struck a chord hard.

I had never heard of Jason Koop before listening to the podcast.  Apparently he coaches a lot of ultra runners, including some of the elites (e.g., Dakota Jones).  There was an interesting dynamic during the interview, because the person conducting the interview naturally was interested in extracting juicy coaching tips and the secrets to training.  But Jason spent much of the interview deflecting these questions, emphasizing that each runner is individual and there is no formula that is generalizable for all runners.  Jason emphasized that unlike some coaches who also are runners themselves or RDs or have a full-time job, Jason only does coaching, and treats it like a craft.  He tailors workouts and training structures to an individual athlete, based on all kinds of variables including how quickly they recover.

Aaron hadn’t heard of Jason Koop either, and I pointed out the podcast for him on the website.

‘God it’s so frustrating,’ I put my head in my hands on the table.  I felt like I had found a unicorn.

When Aaron met me four years ago, my running was ‘unstructured’.  I didn’t own a watch.  And no, I don’t mean I didn’t own a GPS watch.  I mean I didn’t own any kind of device that could inform you of the time, except my cell phone.  I didn’t keep any log of miles.  To train for a marathon, I made sure I went out one Saturday a couple weeks before the race and did a ‘long run’.  I figured if I could run at least 18 miles on that day, I’d be set.  I could always squeeze out another 8 on marathon day.

Of course, I just waved my hands and guessed what 18 miles was back then.  Now with modern technology I have deduced that for my 2008 Marine Corp marathon my single ‘long run’ in Rock Creek Park was ~15 miles, for my 2010 Marine Corp my ‘long run’ around the Mall was ~14 miles, and for my 2009 Boston Marathon my long run was in a coffee plantation in Laos and probably wasn’t much more than 10 miles.  I probably ran 30-40 miles a week for regular training; less when I traveled.  But, I did sub-3 at all those marathons and figured I was the Queen of Marathon Training.

Aaron and I quickly came to discover that we had very divergent notions of ‘marathon training’.  In fact, he contended that my version could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered ‘training’.  And I had to agree with him.  ‘Training’ was in fact a dirty word.  For me, training meant Ned.  And Bob.  Old men trying to bend me to their will.  Aaron picked up on this very quickly and astutely averted any appearance that we might be ‘training’ for something.  If stopping to look at birds and mushrooms on our runs bothered him in any way, he disguised it very well.

I have a tendency to demonize my college track coach Ned.  From my perspective, he destroyed what could have been a fruitful collegiate career for me.  But as time goes on I try to be more balanced in my perspective.  My teammates had a lot of respect for him: he had been a wunderkid 800 meter runner who came agonizingly close to qualifying for the Olympics (less than a second).  He was a very technically proficient coach and I liked the way he scheduled our training to sacrifice success at the beginning of the season but sharpen and peak by the end.  I also liked the way he had us do ‘blind’ workouts where he would only tell us one interval at a time what to run (i.e., run 800m at 2:45-2:48 pace).  The intention was to fight our natural inclination to run slower in the middle of the workout.  Definitely made us run harder.

Ned and I got along splendidly….for about two days.  I was in his good graces for the first workout of the 2001 cross country season.  New England is beautiful in the fall, and I ran the workout as hard as I could, finishing first among teammates in each of the three one-mile repeats through the meadows.  It was by far the hardest and longest workout I had ever done, and I was proud to have my first collegiate cross country workout in the bag.  But I was a spindly little runner, a mere ~115 lbs, who raced hard but never trained.  Despite being the Maryland state cross country champion in high school, a typical day of training was to run a warm-up lap around the track and trot 2.5-3 miles around the neighborhood.  The only reason I had any speed at all was because I played travel-team soccer fall-winter-spring.

So my legs had not been ready for that caliber of workout.  And two days later when it was time to do another workout, I suggested that I should just jog around and try to shake out the lactic acid.  Amherst’s first meet of the season was in two days, and I was afraid I’d be totally dead-legged.  Ned chafed.  To his credit, Ned had gone through his calendar and very carefully designed each and every team workout over those months with a mind towards an ultimate goal: Nationals in November.  I begrudgingly trotted at half-speed through the workout, which only incensed him more.  We argued: he contended that the team was in base-building period and that I was supposed to feel dead-legged in September; I couldn’t reconcile doing a speed workout with building a base.  From that day on, he thought I was a princess who thought she deserved special treatment, and I felt like he wasn’t on my team.  Everything we did was perceived through those filters, and we clashed time and again

The second xc meet of the season fell a few days after September 11, 2001.  I had felt dead-legged at our first meet and didn’t have a great race, but I was our team’s first finisher and we won the meet as a team.  Ned was satisfied.  But I had an intense reaction to 9/11.  I hadn’t lost any loved ones in the Towers. I didn’t have any personal tragedies.  But the night of 9/12 I slept for 20+ hours.  Through all my classes.  When I finally woke up I couldn’t tell if it was morning or evening.  For the next few days I had no energy, like a zombie.  I didn’t even try to run.   But it was decided to hold our Saturday meet, and I dressed in uniform and rode the bus.  But after warm-up I told Ned that I was in some kind of post-9/11 funk, a depression, and I was not in a mindset to race.  Ned was unconvinced.  Everyone else on the team was running.  None of my friends or family had been lost in the Towers.  I ran about a half mile of the race and dropped.  Ned scowled at me for the rest of the day.  He pointed at all my other teammates standing around who had run their guts out that day, despite whatever trauma they may have experienced.  I had let each of them down.

The xc team was kind of a cult.  Ned liked it that way.  Everyone ate and lived together.  At least three couples from the time I was there wound up getting married.  The fact that I had no interest in being part of the cult made me all the more troubling for Ned.  A lot of girls stayed on the team for purely social reasons — all their closest friends were teammates.  In the end it was all too easy for me to walk away.  I had friends from the soccer team, from the equestrian club, from classes.  My best friend on the xc team was Aparna, who now is a successful professional comedian (a year or so ago Aaron and I watched her perform standup at Sixth & I).  I liked running with her because she was dark and funny and didn’t stop her watch every time we stepped over a log.  After long runs on weekend we went out for big tasty brunches and stuffed ourselves silly.  And we made fun of Ned.  A lot.

Ned and I had a fundamentally different vision of the coach-runner relationship.  I wanted a two-way relationship, where I talked openly about my mental and physical state and we would design a personalized training regimen that played to my strengths and recognized my weaknesses.  Ned perceived any requests for deviations from his team-designed training plan as insurrection.  He once declared, ‘This is not the Martha show!’

Ned suspended me for a critical month of xc training (late Sept to late Oct 2001), forbidding me from running with anyone else on the team, even on my own time.  But I came back at the tail end of the season and dropped a 17:44 5k to finish 19th at Nationals.  It hurt like hell, and after the race I lay in the van ill while my teammates did Iowa sightseeing adventures including the John Deere tractor museum.

The next spring I studied abroad in Melbourne, Australia, with Katelyn, my friend from the Amherst soccer team, and never ran competitively again in college again.  Several times I visited Ned’s office to retrieve my framed All-America certificate.  Each time he held up his hands and said he misplaced it.  I wonder if he eventually threw it out, or if it still languishes at the bottom of his file cabinet somewhere.

When my parents let me transfer after my freshman year of college from Stanford University in California to a small, liberal arts college in New England called Amherst College, they did so on the condition that I visit a therapist once I got to Amherst.  I was offended that my parents thought I’d lost the plot, so I wasn’t too keen on the idea.  But Patricia was awesome.  She quickly grasped why I had made the leap of faith to leave Stanford, and why I was likely to thrive in my new environs in Massachusetts.  Having settled the key issue rather quickly, we spent most of our time talking about Ned.  She recognized that Ned’s approach triggered the exact same reactions as my father had in high school, and that was part of why it made me shut down so quickly.  We also talked about how it came down to a power struggle.  From Ned’s perspective, any compromise on his part would undercut his authority, and diminish him in the eyes of the entire team, whose respect he needed in order to be an effective coach.  From my perspective, I needed a coach who had some give in the reins.  I knew my body well, and there were going to be days where what was good for the team wasn’t going to be good for me.

My senior year, after several seasons of not running, I flirted with the idea of competing again.  I came to some practices, it was kind of awkward, but it was fun to be running on the team again.  But I saw flickers of our old runner-coach power struggle, and there got to be a point where I needed to know that things would be different between Ned and myself, just the slightest indication that he and I could speak to each other like adults and make reasonable compromises.

There was only one thing I hated more about running than Ned, and that was the bun-hugger uniform.  We had severe issues with eating disorders among the girls on our team, including missed semesters from hospitalization, and I thought it was absurd that Ned still told some of the girls on the team they had to lose weight — or why we had to wear ‘thunderwear’ that exposed every bit of cottage cheese on our thighs.  I accepted that when we competed as a team, either in cross country or as a track relay, we needed our uniforms to match exactly.  But I had noticed that there was a girl who ran for Connecticut College who wore regular shorts when she ran an individual track event.

The bun-huggers came to symbolize the Grand Compromise I had in mind when it came to running for Amherst.  On one hand, I was 100% willing to be a teammate when competing for a relay or in cross country, when we raced as a team.  But when I was competing on my own, in the 1500m or the 3000m, I wanted to wear simple black shorts that I would be more comfortable in.  All the men wore black shorts.

‘Girls just don’t look good in shorts,’ Ned replied to my proposal, unflinching.

We stared at each other.  You could have carved through the hostility in the room with a butter knife.

‘Ned, you understand that we have severe eating disorders on this team.’  I myself had struggled to keep my weight up, had skipped a period, and wouldn’t get my health sorted out until I got a doctor to write me a note excusing me from the required Amherst meal plan because of my low weight (I was inspired to finally get off the detested meal plan when another friend of mine got to eat off campus after his doctor wrote him a note attesting to Todd’s ‘excessive flatulence’ problem caused by dining hall food).

I left the room in silence.  I had worn the bun-huggers for two whole seasons.  But I never would again.  They had become a symbol.  Ned had no idea that our conversation that day was about a lot more than bun-huggers.

I had big dreams.  Another girl on the team, Carter H., would go on to win NCAA championships and be All-America at least ten times.  She and I finished within 0.1 seconds of each other at Nationals.  Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d stuck it out, or if Ned had just met me a fraction of the way in the middle.  I wasn’t the only star female runner Ned had alienated.  All-America Katie S. had quit the team before I even joined.

My mom has often quibbled that I’m not very ‘accommodating’.  Ned was not the first coach to call me a ‘princess’.  But the truth is, if I were a guy, the term simply would have been ‘headstrong’.  I would eventually self-adopt the moniker ‘uncoachable’.  My mom still doesn’t know what kind of magic beans Aaron used to get me to agree to have a boyfriend.  Or to do a triathlon.  Pony whisperer.

My last semester at Amherst I lived several miles off campus on a horse farm.  My roommates were working adults in their late 20s, including the first guy I’d ever met who served actively in the military (Amherst College didn’t even let ROTC on campus).  I jaunted around on my own along the Pioneer Valley’s beautiful trails and ran my first marathon, again with Katelyn, in New York City in 3:14.  It was a very hot day and I sweltered in the crusty tye-dyed T-shirt my friend made for me, and discovered a Cliff bar was not the right thing to eat during a hot marathon.  I had to get an IV at Beth Israel hospital afterwards because I wasn’t holding down any food or liquid.  My mom exclaimed in relief, ‘At least you never have to run another marathon!’  I told her I couldn’t wait to do another.

~   ~   ~

This winter Aaron bought me my first GPS watch.  The watch’s truth serum was tough to swallow at first.  Runs I thought were 15 miles turned out to be 11 or 12, and runs I called 10 were really 7.  You’ve got to be kidding, I’m not running 10:30 pace!  My ego was shattered.

It’s still a work in progress, and we haven’t been able to get the heart rate monitor bit to function.  I signed up for Strava for tracking but won’t release my data publicly (although to my dismay apparently people get emails about segment records).  I don’t actually look at the watch at all while I run.  But after years of insulating myself against anything with the slightest whiff of structure, I am now aware of how many miles I’m typically running a week. And I’ve accompanied Aaron on a road run with 7 minute pick-ups, and have agreed to try to do it more regularly.

I’m still far from being in a place where I want to ‘train’. I don’t have any schedule or plan. But while I can get away with running 5k-marathon distances without any structured training, it’s harder to run ultras well without any sense of mileage. Although I’ve had some good races, I keep puking and I’ve had mostly bad ultras. I’ve thought many times of giving up at ultras altogether, just going to back to the shorter distances that I can run on birdwatching and mushroom hunting. But Aaron knows I have legs that want to throw down some serious distance. Maybe competitively, maybe not. I have to admit, after listening to Jason Koop I can see how I might plausibly some day accept a tailored training plan. It definitely took Aaron by surprise when I put on that watch.  We’ll see if I have some more surprises up my sleeve.

~    ~    ~

Regrets

I recently read an interview with Shalane Flanagan where she reflects about Rita Jeptoo recently testing positive for doping.  The most crushing part about her interview is where Shalane talks about the theoretical Moment that was stolen from her, standing on the podium with her wreath.  A moment that was stolen not just from her, but from her family and supporters.  None of us are potentially winning the Boston Marathon, but I think anyone who has been running a while can think of moments that slipped through their fingers, that could have happened had the water just happened to have flown down the other side.  I know Aaron feels like he was in the shape of his life going into the 2007 Chicago Marathon, perfectly poised to break the 2:30 marathon barrier, and then the temperatures soared above 90 degrees.  My friend and former coach Selena (who can definitely weigh in on my ‘uncoachable’ aspects from high school) finished second in the Marine Corps Marathon in 2:51 in the late 1990s and was poised to have a go at an Olympic Trials qualifier when she had a freak accident and broke her leg stepping on a log in Rock Creek Park.  In State College, Rebecca Donahue finished 7th at the Olympic Trials in the 5,000 in 2012, but has been plagued by one crazy health problem (e.g., kidney stones) after another.  It’s so easy to dwell on how things might have gone had certain variables been different.  I’m someone who in particular left a lot of stones unturned and have a lot of ‘what ifs?’  It sounds awfully cheesy, but at the end of the day I have no regrets.  PRs and CRs are nice, but can be a distraction.  Aaron and I both comment that the worst feature of Strava and our GPS watches is their obsession with PRs:  Oooh, we set a PR on that 0.5 mile stretch along the Potomac today!

One of the first times I met Aaron’s mom, who is also a competitive runner and regular age-group winner, we had a conversation about marathons:

‘Yeah, I could probably train up and qualify for Olympic Trials,’  I admitted.  ‘But it would require very focused training.  And it’s not like I’m going to qualify for the Olympics or anything.’

‘Oh, but wouldn’t that be so cool!’ Mrs Schwartzbard exclaimed.  ‘That would be such a great thing to talk about at cocktail parties!’

Early on, I was very shy and had a habit of talking to Aaron instead of directly to his parents.  ‘Aaron, I don’t go to cocktail parties, do I?’

 

 

 

SnowShoeFest IV

Canaan Valley, WV

February 27 – March 1, 2015

My obsession with iMovie continues…..

The SnowShoeFest Main Event of 2015 had already taken place in late January (SnowShoeFest III).  But Aaron and I, departing temporarily from our ‘Lazy Bears’ theme of 2015, decided to go for a Bonus Round, and host the Clappons and Knipling/Dahls (how come no one has a joint name for Keith and Tracy?  they could be the Dahl-lings) a month later for Round II (initially dubbed SnowShoeFest IIIb, but we eventually settled on SnowShoeFest IV).

This proved to be a wise decision, as Aaron’s video footage of Joe, Tracy, and Michele doing their ‘Three Stooges’ version of snowshoeing (see above) will provide entertainment for years to come.

You may have noticed that I don’t write my usual chapters of blog for SnowShoeFests.  In part that’s because while I’m willing to write at length about my own thoughts and experiences, SnowShoeFest is really not about my experience.  But it’s a weekend where my own priorities kind of go limp.  It’s more about sitting back, opening our doors, and making sure our friends enjoy their taste of our little Canaan world.

But I will provide an FAQ for questions likely to arise from viewing the video:

A: Yes, that is Baby Bur making a cameo.  The Burs independently made plans to go to Canaan the same weekend as SnowShoeFest IV and by some miracle we were able to cross paths several times.

A: No, Joe, Michele and Tracy did not spend most SSFIV on their bottoms, as the video may have suggested.  There was one brief point at the end where I decided to go off-piste to go through some deep snow where snowshoes of lesser quality were not as effective at staying upright.

A: No, I’m afraid I can’t explain Joe’s selection of outerwear.

A: Yes, that is an excellent question why Tracy is holding poles the length of her full body.  Joe seems to have thought that we’d be snowshoeing through many feet of soft snow, in which case such poles would have been very useful.  This turned out not to be the case, and Joe and Michele promptly returned the poles to the rack after about 3 minutes of failed snowshoeing.

A: Yes, getting the friendly (and now fat) Canaan chickadees to eat sunflower seeds out of your palm is not difficult.  Joe and Michele are our witnesses.  Canaan has no ticks, poison ivy, or poisonous snakes.  We’re still working on getting the chickadees to sew ball gowns for us and wash the dishes.

A: Speaking of Canaan being magical: yes, the highlight of the trip could very well have been when we ran into a merry group of fellow snowshoeing revelers several hours into our trek who happened to be stocked with an extremely large quantity of moonshine (very smooth, according to Tracy) and beers they were happy to share.  Joe was smitten.

A: Yes, that is the best resemblance of a moose that we have ever seen made naturally by snow.

A: I’m sorry, I have no explanation for how Aaron achieves such levels of adorableness.  I’ll get back to you after further study.

This is a blog by Betsy “Boots” Nickle.  It’s been some time since we’ve someone else write here, and some of you may have forgotten that wussies.net is not my personal blog and is a platform for all wussies to publish race reports, videos, random freeform train of thought, and poems.  You can even register and publish it yourself (or I’m happy to post it if you email it to me).

Holiday Lake 50k

“Mindfulness is about being fully aware of whatever is happening in the present moment, without filters or the lens of judgment…Put simply, mindfulness consists of cultivating awareness of the mind and body and living in the here and now.” – Stahl & Goldstein

At Holiday Lake this year, I tried a different approach than years past. I ran mindfully. It meant that I evaluated my thoughts carefully (i.e. notice when I was agitated and identify how it was manifesting in my emotions). This approach gave me the space to enjoy the experience much more.

In the past, I have tried to push past the basic realization that this race should be a training run for me because of when it’s held. I have experienced the great crash, burn, and self-loathing for several miles. Even if you don’t want to admit it, we have all had those moments where the following questions arise: Why did I pay to run a race? Or is it okay to sit on the side of a trail on a flat runnable course because of the pain in a particular part of my body seems crippling at this time? By employing mindfulness early on, I quickly realized that this race was going to be a training run. Since this race was the only thing that I had to do on 2/14/15, being mindful forced me to be in the moment as much as possible.

I noticed so many beautiful things that I have overlooked in the past like the lake with docks along the course, the sunrise, or even the pine trees that lined a part of the course. As I ran this race, I found myself really dipping into the experience. I embraced setting a pace that suited me and ran my own race, which reduced the impact of difficult emotions.

In our lives, we have so many emotions coming and going at times and barely enough time to notice them.          During this race, some difficult emotions arose for me as a result of being cold.   By giving myself the space and time to identify my emotions than push them away or ignore them. It allowed me to label them and become more compassionate toward myself. When I labeled the emotions, it enabled me to feel them and let them go.

I have found that a deep exhale is one of the best ways to deal with difficult emotions that arise on the trails. Along the course, I strategically used well timed exhales to release emotions that arose that would not help me proactively finish the race. Funny thing is that exhaling is so easy, which is exact reason why I overlooked doing it for so long. I found that balancing my inhales and exhales made a major difference for me because it gave me a technique to get out of my head, come back to the present moment, and connect with my body again.

By embracing running long distance as extended meditation, it became seamlessly easier for me. Yes, there were times when I had big dreams and other moments where I wished the scenery would change. Yes, I felt tension in my muscles. Yes, my butt hurt at one point and my knee at another point. Those pains were just a time and a place in the run. By being mindful, they did not become a dark cloud that did not pass during this run. I found that coming back to the moment (i.e. the place where the mind-body connects). It was one of the most refreshing experiences in trail running because it creates a sense of being alive.

Along the course, I found myself embracing the core tenants of trail running: nature and community. I noticed the beauty of winter because it allowed the sun to shine on the trails creating shadows on the trails that looked like elaborate patterns.

I also interacted with some neat people on the trails. I enjoyed chatting with a young woman who had completed several Ironmans. Holiday Lake was her first 50k. I had a guy comment on my shoe (a regular occurrence in every Horton race/training run). In the past has bordered along the lines of creepy because I was seemingly alone in the woods with a limited exit strategies running with a man who openly shares his foot fetish. This time, I just laughed it off. Finally, I found myself running along side of a woman who continually sounded like she was going to cough up a lung. I provided her with a 5-minute pump up talk, where I continually re-enforced that she would finish the race. When she came across the finish line, I saw her with tears in her eyes looking for a hug. I provided it to her only to receive a huge thank you.

Honestly, I find that the courage and strength of trail runners is amazing and invigorating. It gives me hope in humanity because every time it shows me that when people put their minds to something they will achieve it regardless of any initial perceived obstacles.

Often I bomb down the hill at the finish, but I didn’t this time. I took it at a steady pace. I saw my friend Martha. I stopped and we talked for a few minutes. It was uplifting for me because I was happy to see her and celebrate in her success of setting a course record. When I crossed the line, I was pleasantly surprised at my 5:45 time. That was good enough for me! The next day, my body felt relatively good for a person who has not run a 20 miler in the past month. I attribute to the fact that I kept my mind relatively calm during the experience, so my body did not take a beating (i.e. mind-body connection).

At the end of the day, Holiday Lake helped me to re-kindle my love for running again. I had been put on hold for the past month as I made a huge transition in my life (a job change). I connected with old friends. Most of all, I spent time with one of the biggest love affairs in my life ‘trail running.’ I really live to explore the world through the medium of running. I love putting on a pair of running shoes and going to play in the dirt. I end up with more dirt on me than you can ever imagine, but I continue to run dirty because it teaches me more then I can ever put into words!

‘So, like, is Holiday Lake your favorite race?’  He was a Liberty student I had run with for a stretch who had proudly just completed his first ultra.

‘Holiday Lake is my least favorite race,’ I replied deadpan.  ‘Trust me, this is the toughest.  It’s fast and long and boring.  On the bright side, everything you do from now on will be better.’

He looked incredulous.

‘Promise Land.  Trust me.’

~                ~               ~

Holiday Lake 50k++

Holiday Lake, VA

February 14, 2015

Results

Holiday Lake fell on Valentines Day this year, and Love Was in the Air.  Boots was my Valentines date for the weekend, as my Valentines gift to Aaron was to let him spend his Saturday napping, knitting, and squeezing the kitty instead of waking up at 4am to help me clean puke out of my hair and take shit from Horton about his ugly chops.  Pretty sure that was Aaron’s best Valentines Day gift ever.

I had an explicit goal for HL2015: Redemption.  I had run HL in 2012 and it had been Ugly.  After leading the whole race, I had vomited four times at the last aid station ended up crawling across the line in 3rd place.  Bethany passing me right at the finish line had been particularly tough to stomach.  I’ll never forget the appalled look of Matty Woods, who had been training with me on the track, and knew just how far south things must have gone for me not to be able to hold Bethany off.  After the run, Matt had given me his shirt to warm up in, even though I was streaked with vomit, and nursed me back to life with hot tea.  A kindness I haven’t forgotten.

I can’t exactly say that I was physically geared up for Holiday Lake this year.  Lately I’ve been on the losing side of injuries.  And who is ever well trained for an off-season race like HL?  But mentally I was honed in.  I’ve come a long way since 2012, and even though I still am plagued by stomach problems and vomiting at ultra-length distances  (see my ‘Pussies Fly Together‘ post for the description of my little pukefest at my first 50 miler at Bull Run).  But I’ve had glimmers of what I can do over long distances when my stomach holds, like my CR at Highland Sky, and I sometimes re-read my ‘Keeping it in the Pants‘ post from that day to remind myself that, contrary to some people’s impressions, I’m not an inherently short-distance runner, and my legs are happy to cover an awfully long distance if my stomach will allow it.

Boots was a splendid Valentines date, and we had a merry ride down to Lynchburg and arrived at the Holiday Lake 4-H Center in good spirits, even on 4 hours of sleep.  When I’d done HL in 2012 we’d arrived at the race after it had already started and it was total chaos, so it was especially nice to enjoy a full half-hour to check in, go to the bathroom, and catch up with folks.  I was happy to see Mark and Phillip, Aaron’s friends from Reston, whose intended long Valentines weekend together had apparently been scuttled by Phillip’s wife Marcie, who for some reason objected to the plan (women!).  I was also happy to see John Andersen again, newly anointed VHTRC Rookie of the Year.  I have not forgotten our adventure at Catherine’s Fat Ass, where John had selected to run his first ultra on an awfully tough run through the Massanuttans on a day that happened to be a miserably hot 98F.  In case we weren’t uncomfortable enough, Neal G kicked a hornet’ nest and we all got badly stung.  It was the kind of day that could have been bloody miserable, had it not been for John’s infectious newbie enthusiasm.

The race started in the dark.  I didn’t carry a light, which served as a good natural check on my speed, and there were many ponytails bobbing ahead of me going into the first aid station.  Even though I’m not a morning person, there is something serene about passing by the lake that first time during the sunrise, and feeling the darkness slowly lift over those opening miles.

Running downhill with abandon has been my signature since I was 14.  I’m pretty sure the only reason Andrish was willing to put off his beloved laundry routine and run with me all those years was because we had so much fun running down the trails in Rock Creek Park.  So what has really killed me about my recent spat of injuries has been what it’s done to my ability to run down hills.  Whether it’s my hamstring acting up or or my foot or my wobbly ankle, I’ve been tentatively pussyfooting down the hills in training for the past couple years, draining all the fun out of running.

But in the last month I’ve been really working on loosening and strengthening my left ankle, stabilizing my hips and core, and starting to feel a little life come back into my downhill descents.  The first real descent of HL comes at mile 6.  I can’t remember the last time I really let loose on a downhill.  Maybe last April at Bull Run?  I don’t care how the rest of the race went, it was all worth it just to fly down that one hill.  It didn’t fit with my race plan to not take the lead until at least the second half of the race, as I passed at least 8 people including Bethany, who was leading the women’s race at the time.  But if my ankle is holding, my hamstring isn’t complaining, and my IT bands are quiet, my self-restraint goes out the window on the downhills.

Flying down the hill had shot my adrenaline high.  But I made sure to reel it as soon as we crossed the icy creek at the bottom of the hill, and intentionally plodded.  I could hear Bethany talking to other runners behind me, and I was kind of kicking myself for taking the lead well before I had intended, but I figured as long as I ran real relaxed and easy it couldn’t do much harm.

Some time after the third aid station I felt an urge to pee.  Seemed like a perfect way to make up for my error in taking the lead too soon, and I peeled off into the woods.  It was a cold day and I was wearing long tights, which always make it pain in the ass for a girl to pee.  But I’ve gotten over being self-conscious on trail runs — when you gotta go, you gotta go.  But when I squatted to pee it was very bad news: nothing came out.  I just had this massive bloated feeling of needing to get something to exit out of at least one of the orifices, but nothing was budging.  I had drunk from my bladder a couple times and eaten some peanut butter crackers and gummies, nothing that should have irritated.  Bethany ran on past, and I scurried out from the bushes after her.  She also stopped to pee and we found ourselves running together.  My stomach was uncomfortable, and I decided that the best thing for the time being was to settle in behind her and see if things would calm down if I ceased eating or drinking for a bit.

I had heard stories about Bethany from Aaron — the bubbly blonde girl who was Horton’s protege from Liberty University.  And of course I remembered Bethany from the end of HL the last time I ran it.  We chatted about running and life and such.  She reminded me that Aaron had once saved her at Hellgate when her corneas had frozen, guiding her for hours to an aid station.

At one point she asked me, ‘So you’re a faster road runner type?’

‘I don’t know what kind of runner I am anymore,’ I conceded.  ‘I guess I’m an out-to-pasture-been-running-competively-for-20-years-doesn’t-care-anymore-just-don’t-want-to-puke-anymore-and-run-fast-and-long-in-the-woods runner.’

She told me how she started running after gaining some pounds as a college kid and got hooked into Horton’s running course.  I agreed that people who don’t run competitively on their school teams tend to have longer life spans.

We agreed on a lot of points: the awesomeness of Promise Land, the wretchedness of the Road Across the Sky at Highland Sky, and, we both conceded, how lifeless the Holiday Lake course is, with its boring roads through woods that have been flattened through timber-harvesting.  We came through the halfway point together in 2:10.  My stomach was going in waves, periods where it felt okay, followed by long waves of serious discomfort where I felt like I needed to dash off and scratch some leaves.  But chatting with Bethany made the discomfort much more tolerable, and I fought off the urges to go so that I could continue running with her.  I also wanted to make sure that if I did take the time to stop that something would actually deliver.

One of the nice parts of the out-and-back is that we get to see all the friendly faces on the way back.  There were lots of VHTRC folk on the course — WH Tom, Rob C., Sara D., Toni A., and of course Dear Bootsies!  Such a good boost of positive energy at a time when I was in discomfort.

The pain was building, and I realized I was going to have to make a pitstop.  When the crowds coming in the other direction finally thinned out I made my move.  But no relief; nothing would come out.  I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink, I would end up going the whole race feeling that way, with the problem slithering up my system into nausea.

But it was tolerable as long as I was running along with Bethany.  So I caught up to her again after my failed pitstop and we ran together up to the next aid station, where Horton reprimanded us that ‘This is a race, ladies!’  We knew that he would be irritated with us running together.  We laughed out how very pissed he’d be if we crossed the finish line holding hands.  I had told Bethany flat-out that I wasn’t racing.  That I had stopped eating and drinking, that my stomach wasn’t right, and that I was happy to just run with her all the way to the finish.  Furthermore, Bethany was wearing a watch, and we reasoned that we were both running much faster together than we would have run apart.  So what could be wrong with that?

Especially since the second half of Holiday Lake is so dull.  Those long road sections that were just tolerable on the way out now seemed interminable.  All the ugly things you hadn’t really noticed on the first loop become apparent.  The clear-cut sections of what used to be forest.  The frozen rutty mud bits that hurt to run on.  Running alone it’s very easy to get negative in these barren stretches, but we clipped along together.

The nausea was becoming intense.  I tried to focus on slowing my breathing, steadying my stride, nothing jerky, everything calm.  No unnecessary movements.  My legs were totally fine, but I could feel my internal system writhing, and I couldn’t carry conversation anymore.  So we ran together mostly in silence.  But we were clipping along, at one point doing 7:30 miles.  As lousy as I was feeling, I at least had the solace of knowing that at any given moment of the second loop I was feeling a heckuva lot better than I had in 2012.  I can recall exactly where I had started really gagging in 2012, at the first aid station after the turn-around, and the stretches where I started making little mini vomits into my mouth, prior to the big explosion of projectile vomit that came at mile 29.  So no matter how bad it was, it was better than 2012, and at least I had that going for me~

So it was with a bit of pride that I trotted past the final aid station puke-free.  I smiled to myself recalling those poor Liberty students who’d watched me puke my guts out and tried to bring me a chair and a towel, both of which I had to refuse so I could try to retain the lead I’d held for 25+ miles.  I thought gleefully about how pissed Horton would be when Bethany and I crossed the line together.  It would be such a girly thing to do on Valentines Day.

My nausea was intensifying, but I was still able to run with Bethany at a good pace.  But just before mile 30 there is a short hill that is steep enough to walk.  As soon as I let my pace slow to a walk I had a mini vomit-gag deep in my throat.  My head started spinning and I got seriously worried.  Moments later I released a gorgeous neon yellow spew of vomit into the air.  No hands on knees.  Full airborne arc.  Pure 100% stomach acid bile, as indicated by the neon yellow hue.  I guess that’s what you get when you vomit on an entirely empty stomach.

I’ve begun to start to grade my vomits on their characteristics of color and arc and volume.  This one was a 9.  As John A. would later remind me, it didn’t have quite same beauty as the vomit I did while running Willis River, where I managed to not even break stride and let the vomit just spew down my front.  But this one I was already walking, so not quite so dramatic.

Bethany heard me vomit behind her, but kept up a strong pace.  I felt surprisingly good after the spew, a little dizzy and disoriented, but nothing like the crippling blow of past vomits.  We trotted together around the little grassy point by the lake, the same spot where Leah D. had passed me in 2012, and headed back along the creek.  There were just a couple miles left to go, and I buckled down to get ‘er done.  I hadn’t really eaten or drunk for hours how, and I knew after the vomit that the depletion would be setting in.  But there was so little left to go, just a climb through the woods and the half-mile descent down the road.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Bethany had at this point calculated from her watch that we by some miracle were on course record-breaking pace.  I had been in Fat-Ass mode for hours now, understanding that I wasn’t going to have the bouncy Women’s Half Marathon-esque race I had hoped for, but that I could be happy with a solid training run where I managed an unruly stomach gracefully.  I also liked the fact that Bethany and I had teamed up.  Fast women are relatively sparse compared to the men, and typically run alone, so it’s unusual to have the chance to have fast women running together.  As anyone who’s witnessed a Women’s Half knows, I am perfectly capable of turning up the competitiveness when appropriate.  But I also pride myself on knowing when to turn the nozzle down — whether it’s at our weekly WUS runs, or at a fatass event, or just a regular old training run.  Aaron is a shining model in this regard, and I’ve tried to take note.

Looking back on it, I wish Bethany had just told me what was about to take place.  I had no idea a CR was in the cards, and I was just pleased to be still running steadily post-puke.  If she had told me that she wanted to pick it up, that a CR was on the line, I might have been willing to dig deeper, understanding what was at stake.  It’s hard to know in retrospect how much more I had in me, I was pretty out of it at the time. But we’d been running together for hours now, and I might have found another gear if she had directly asked me to.  At Bull Run I walked through 8 agonizing miles where I no doubt would have quit had it not been for our women’s WUS team, which needed me to finish.  Or if the sickness had totally blown me out and I didn’t think I could do it, I would have just told her to go ahead and go for it and that would have been that.

Instead, I spent the last stretch swimming in confusion.  Bethany blasted up the last hill, and it wasn’t clear to me whether this was Game On, or whether she was just going ahead temporarily. Maybe the idea of finishing with me was less appealing now that she knew how sick I really was.

Horton exclaimed with great enthusiasm as I finished that I too had slipped under the course record.  It now made sense why Bethany had taken off in the end in pursuit of the CR.  I just wish I’d been clued in.   But overall I’m glad Bethany got her course record, and that I rode out a day where things didn’t go my way gracefully.

I had no Matt to nurse me back to health at the finish.  But that was okay this time, as I was in far better shape at the finish than in 2012.  I poured my own hot tea and apple juice and doused myself down in the hot shower, which is the saving grace of HL.

Video courtesy of George Wortley.

Re-watching the finish line scene from this video, one would never guess that it was the 1st & 2nd women, and not the 1st & 2nd men, who had just spent hours running together.  There was a turning point where Bethany smelled the barn when a switch flipped, as if the clock had stuck midnight and the fairy tale was over.  There were no hugs at the finish.

The way the race had ended was not ideal.  But from a larger perspective, I had to be satisfied that I had managed to run just 20 seconds off the course record (it turned out that Horton was mistaken and I was a bit over) on a day where I felt lousy.  I had barely drunk any liquid during the race (my camelback was still nearly full when I finished and I hadn’t stopped at any aid stations).  It was many bottles of powerade and cups of tea and apple juice before I could manage a pee after the race.

I was feeling a bit sore hanging around at the finish line.  Bethany had a great performance and fully deserved her course record.  But even though I’m relatively new to the sport of trail running, I knew that an unspoken etiquette of the trail had been broken today.  Maybe it just applies to a small subset of trail running purists that I happen to run with — the old guard of Sean, Keith, Aaron, etc.  But I know that if two guys are running together for hours, even if one is fresher at the end, they finish together, unless there’s a conversation and mutual consent.  I wouldn’t want to keep Bethany from getting her record because I was sick, I just wish there’d been communication.  I can also understand that the error of margin was so slim (Bethany only broke the record by 20 seconds) that taking extra time to talk to me might have been the difference between breaking the record and not.  But records will fall again some day.  Style lasts forever.

Holiday Lake kind of falls in some grey area between road running and trail running (I saw some dude toss his banana peel on the trail mid-race), and the code of the trail may be somewhat weaker in that setting.  Maybe the etiquette is becoming a thing of the past as trail running and road running worlds intersect more and mentalities spill over.  And it’s possible that the trail etiquette I’m familiar with is more of a Guy Code (in her defense, Bethany mentioned during our chatting that she trains mainly with other moms).   Woman may need more coaching in how to compete, and I think the WHM fills a much-needed role in promoting healthy competition among women — how to run the crap out of themselves on those brutal hills while still supporting each other 100%.  I love that Justine can give me a hell of a scare and then we can hug it out at the end.  I’m not a natural hugger, but if you’re ever going to hug, the WHM is the place to do it — even to women I don’t know.  The WHM is special to me, and I will miss competing there (although I expect volunteering will be rewarding but in a different way).  But there is sometimes a weird competitiveness between women that goes beyond friendly rivalry.  And from time to time I kind of get a little jolt of it.

To get a breather from the finish line scene and the swarm of Crozet Racing Team jackets (I’ll have to tell Keith that the WUSsies can’t race anymore until we have an official team of carefully selected members and spiffy jackets to advertise elite status), I took a long walk up the hill to greet other WUSsies coming in.  A loose dog ran up barking and snarling at my heels.  I had blisters on the bottoms of both feet.  But all the clouds lifted when dear Bootsies popped out of the woods having a grand ole time of it.  She’d had a rough HL last year in the snow, so I was delighted to see how great she was feeling.  Tom and Sara also came down the hill in great spirits.  Holiday Lake isn’t the most glorious course, but it’s fun to be a part of a big event with a lot of history where a lot of people are running an ultra for the first time.  It’s also a great mid-winter test of fitness with excellent volunteers, impeccable course markings, and with a wide diversity of runners who I wouldn’t typically race with – like Mark and Phillip.

I was in a much better mood hanging out with the WUSsies, getting some bbq to eat, and sitting for what must have been hours talking.  Because by the time we went back outside to leave, the place had entirely cleared out. We cheered on the last finisher, and then Boots and I made the drive back to DC.  Even though it would have been nice to have Aaron around to help me when I was feeling sick after the race and cheer me up after a rough day, I was glad to have time to just hang out with Boots and catch up on life.  All the stuff you don’t talk about when boys are around~

The second half of my Valentines Day present to Aaron was a promise to come home in a good mood.  He had seen online that Bethany had won the race, and was prepared for a less-than-happy marmot.  But I made good on my promise, and saw the silver lining.  Because even though my race had not gone as planned, I had my downhill running back, I had pep and strength in my legs even when my stomach was ailing, and on a day when I had faded out of a racing mentality, was totally dehydrated and depleted and just trying to keep the contents of my stomach in, I still had run a fast time on that course.  We ran a really solid second half, only 3 minutes slower than our first half, really a remarkably steady pace even as I ailed. I’ll be back to HL, hopefully next year, to give it another go.  And sometimes the final result is a poor indication of what was achieved.  For me, calm in the face of discomfort, holding course even after regurgitation, these are important things to have in my toolbox.  It may be a while before I have a clear stomach day at the races, but in the meantime I can learn ways to run through.

What was my Valentines Day present, you might ask?  Besides that pretty white Patagonia backpack presented to me as my Special Horton Valentine?  My Valentine was getting to come home to someone who can 100% relate to all the strange emotions and sensations that had occurred that day.  Who fully understood why I had confused emotions about the last stretch of the race — happiness that I’d helped Bethany rock a new course record, but stung by the way it all went down in the last stretch.  The last miles were weird — when you get that depleted and dehydrated and dizzy and sick, your brain just sets onto autopilot, and I just couldn’t snap into race mode.  You stop making decisions, you just have instincts left.  But if I were 14, this is the very predictable conversation that I would have had with my dad after a race like that, with him pacing back and forth in the living room, waving his hands wildly as if they helped spur his thought process.  I would sit on the couch petting Champagne our very fat cat, chin tucked:

‘So why didn’t you stick with her up that final hill?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you must have seen that she was picking up the pace.  Why didn’t you stay on her?’

‘I don’t know.  Maybe I thought I’d catch her on the downhill.’

‘Well then you just entirely misestimated.  You let her get way too far ahead.’

‘Dad, I wasn’t even racing.  I thought we were running together.’

‘Well, you must have realized she was starting to race.’

‘God, this is just like the stupid third lap thing….’  I rubbed my forehead hard.  My father was convinced that I should run all my mile splits evenly.

‘You’re exactly right.’  He stopped pacing momentarily and rubbed his beard.  His theories came from his professional experience as an economist, not from any experience on the track.  ‘Why can’t you fix that?’

‘You don’t know what it’s like.  In the moment it honestly feels like I’m running as hard as I can.’

‘Look, you have to trick yourself.  Pretend the 3rd lap is the 4th and final lap.  If you fade, that’s okay.’

I would get quiet, stroking the cat as I listened silently for another ten minutes or so.

 

My 2015 Valentines Day present was never having to have that conversation.  Even better than that, it was sitting down with Aaron and having the anti- version of that conversation.  It’s a fight to the death between Aaron of Reason and Knowledge and the 14-year old on the couch whose every decision was wrong and weak, who would wallow in the failure for days.  What will prevail, actual personal experience and the scientific literature (e.g., the Central Governor Hypothesis that tries to explain why even the most elite runners have slow third laps — and likely why I walked stretches of the last hill, despite the fact that Bethany was clearly slipping away), or the Voice of Bob?  Aaron gradually, methodically spins my mind in back towards reality and sanity.  He’s spent a lot of time with Bob; he knows exactly what he’s up against.

Just as Aaron thinks he’s finally killed the Beast, Horton send a taunting little email about how I should have followed Bethany up the hill, sending Aaron back into the ring to make a final slay.  Monday night I’ll see my father and Aaron could be presented with another head of the serpent to battle.  But for the time being I’m in the clear.  I’m haunted, I wake up at 5am replaying the hill over and over again.  Why didn’t I realize that the tenor of the race was changing, that it was time to race?  But I know which side is reality and which side is evil, and fight it off.  Best Valentines Day present ever.

 

SnowShoeFest III

Canaan Valley, WV

January 31 – February 1, 2015

 

 

 

 

There were a lot of new faces at SSFIII this year.  There was Sarah Wright, fresh off of hip surgery.

This was Cecily and Ben’s web redemption from their snowless New Year’s visit.

Over 14″ of snow had fallen in the last week and it was a winter wonderland.

The towering conifers in Stone Coal flats were a definite highlight.

The thermometer read 6 degrees in the morning, bringing out the Mad Bomber hat.  But bright sun, not a cloud in the sky, and it got pretty roasty toasty on the climb up to Bald Knob.