Author: martha

Fire on the Mountain 50k

Flintstone, MD

November 6, 2011

http://www.phdispatch.com/FOTM_2011_results.html

 

WUS represent!  All 3 wussies (Aaron Schwartzbard, Martha Nelson, Selena Smart) make the post-race headline.

 

A race sponsored by SHEETZ!  How could a wussie pass up??  They had Sheetz shirts, Sheetz bags, they even had a little Sheetz truck at the finish line serving free Sheetz smoothies, coffees, hot chocolate, and other goodies.  Where the heck was Andrish??  Honestly, Seanie would have LOVED this course and this race.  The terrain was rocky and full of deep stream crossings (the race director said he stopped counting them after 30 or so).  It’s not trivial to negotiate those rocks in completely numb feet (continually re-numbed by the icy waters), and Selena and I both have black toenails to show for — not so much fun to kick rocks with numb toes.  (For those who don’t know, Selena Smart is my former high school track & XC coach who is now a mother of 3 crazy boys in Van Ness but is still running and technically a wussie, having done a WUS with Keith, Dave Rees, and myself back one summer eve.  Back in the day I thought Selena was a tyrant bent on destroying teenage runnergirls)

This race was all Selena’s idea.  She emailed me that she was doing this race about a month or so ago.  I was torn because it was scheduled for the same day as Marine Corps Marathon and I had planned to be happy, cheery race support for Aaron and spend the day with his parents, who live 1/2 a block from the MCM course in Arlington.  But given that Selena and I weren’t running MountainBack together (Selena had to back out when the race was moved this year from Sat to Sun) and I wasn’t running any other races this fall, I decided to join in.

But the day before the race the course got hit with 6-8″ of snow and had to be canceled because the school buses couldn’t navigate the mountain roads in the snow (FOTM is a point-to-point).  So it was delayed one week and I got to watch AarBear run his Marine Corps Marathon AND make him come run FOTM with Selena and myself.  Double score!

The plan was to drive Selena’s 3 boys and dog to her parents’ farm outside Winchester, dispose of them, have some homecooked dinner, and then have a peaceful pre-race night sleep at America’s Best Value Inn in Hancock, MD.  So we all piled into Selena’s minivan: Selena, Aaron, 3 hyper boys, a Belgian Malinois with bad breath, and myself.

The Smart family homestead was a dream home, situated ~20 southeast of Winchester near the Shenandoah River and Appalachian Trail, 80 acres of rolling farmland with cattle, horses, and three buildings constructed by Mr. Smart himself: the main house, the garage (with apartment above), and a barn that was so sparkling I’m convinced Andrish would try to secure himself a stall of his own if he could.  I, of course, was obsessed with the horses.  Aaron and I have an open invitation to return some day to stay in the apartment over the garage and ride horses and hang out.  We will be taking the Smarts up on that offer.

We had a big meal of chicken & dumplings (we found some mac ‘n’ cheese in the cupboard for Aaron) and made our way to America’s Best Value Inn, which was not America’s Best Quality Inn.  We had a choice: we could get woken up by the heater when it kicked into gear every 20 minutes or so.  Or we could turn the heater off and freeze.  We opted for the latter, piling all the blankets on from the second bed (apparently Selena did the same).  After a sporadic sleep the kicker was when our 5am wakeup call came at 4am because they neglected to account for the end of Daylight’s Savings time.  For breakfast we introduced Selena to the glory of Sheetz, providing edible foods and beverages in a town that otherwise had…..nothing.

The race was great fun, a beautiful course, surprisingly technical, a good mix of terrains, friendly and low-key.  Nothing beats a crisp fall day with blue sky and sun.  I had a lot of concerns coming into the race: (1) my hamstring was still griping about that poor decision to stand on the sidelines at Marine Corps, freeze to the bone, and then jump in with Aaron at 6-minute pace for a few miles (hence my wearing the butt-ugly spandex); (2) I had taken a bad spill at WUS that week and had badly bruised up my right knee and hip and it still was bothering me; (3) and of course my plantar fasciitis was still acting up that had plagued me since Cascade Crest.  Fortunately, none of concerns 1-3 was much of a problem on race day.  Instead, my gastrointestinal system flared up.

I’m not going to go into detail on my gastrointestinal adventures.  As I’ve said many a time before, this is an area I’m going to have to figure out before I can become an ultra runner.  I can get away with it for the shorter races you don’t have to eat during but 5+ hours does me in.  But it says a heckuva lot about this race how much I enjoyed it despite the stomach ails.  It was a really fun course, never a dull moment.  Aaron almost fell off a cliff into the creek; the guy running behind me fell every 10 minutes or so; Selena was not so into the technicality of the trail; I smashed my foot up and my leg looks like an army of rabid cats got to it.  Good times!

I can’t resist including this photo.  I’m not sure what I’m doing at this moment, but I’ve discovered that Aaron is the most photogenic runner and I am the least:

 

 

Tussey MountainBack 50-mile relay

State College, PA

Sunday October 23, 2011

 

I was impossibly nice to the cashier at Trader Joes in Bethesda last night.  I gave my mom an unusually long hug last night after our Monday night Old Lady Aerobics + dinner tradition.  I spent all morning cleaning my apartment, scrubbing parts of my toilet and under furniture that have never been cleaned since I moved in, because I knew sitting at a computer and trying to do phylogenetic analysis simply wouldn’t work today.  I’ve had a somewhat delayed reaction to Ed’s tragic death on Leg 8 of the Tussey MountainBack 50-mile relay.  Maybe it’s because our van was ahead of the event and really didn’t grasp the severity of the situation until Marty broke the news just as I was saying my last goodbyes before driving back to DC.  So I never had a chance to share my grief with other NVRC runners, departing for DC before the sadness really set in.  For the few minutes between learning the news from Marty and departing I was caught in a bizarre state of shock combined with lingering post-race high (I must confess, with a tinge of guilt, that our team had a great time, as we were largely spared from the terrible shadows of the day until the very end when we were departing).

I may have to return to State College for the memorial run in two weeks.  I can’t think of any way to cope with the sadness other than to be with my Nittany Valley Running Club (NVRC)  family as we collectively grieve along the trail of Ed’s last steps.

It may seem inappropriate to speak of this year’s MountainBack experience in light of Ed’s tragedy, given that up until the very end my experience was so overwhelmingly positive, while it was so traumatic for others.  But MountainBack is something sacred for me, and even this darkest cloud does not diminish its standing as the most exceptional race there is — the only race where when my friend Tany asked me to be a bridesmaid in the wedding she held two weeks ago, I told her (to a bit of her chagrin) that I had to check my calendar first to make sure it didn’t conflict with Tussey (I’m sorry, MtBk comes first!).  It meant so much to be able to give Aaron a taste of why this little relay is so special.

Maybe next year I’ll write more details about what Tussey MountainBack is all about — how the Draft Relay Challenge (DCR) works with its captains and bios and picks and such.  How our dear Commish John Sheakoski thwarts my plans every year to bend the rules so that I can have the people I want on my team (poor Aaron had to chug up Legs 4 and 10 with me since John deemed him too fast to replace Selena).  Or to explain why the race is the greatest running party in the world, a simultaneous celebration of gut-busting effort and the social bonds that seem to naturally germinate within and among the teams as the race goes on.

For now you’re just going to have to take my word that there is no running group as tight-knit as the NVRC, no relay scheme as ingenious as the DCR, and no race that so captures the spirit of running as the Tussey MountainBack.  Ed’s tragedy — and the way our group has responded to it — has only intensified these convictions.

 

With only one day to go before the WUS Donut Run of Champions (DROC), it seemed that the WUSsies were living up to their name.  Robin & Kirsten had shown donut spirit, but no male freely dared to challenge Neal Gorman’s feats of sugary domination from last April: we assumed Adam didn’t have a choice, Sean was moaning about excess patent work, Doug was infatuated by his Ben & Jerry’s, and Keith was leading a rival run to promote sugary temperance.

But on race day the WUS responded to Neal’s call to arms (http://www.twitvid.com/61YZT). Jon L-D had run DROC’s sister run, UROC, just days before, and was nursing a bruised foot. It was not until the middle of the afternoon that he confirmed his participation in DROC. Sean was able to put aside the drill bit reviews for an evening of running and junk food consumption (which, truth be told, is a fairly standard evening for Sean). The ringer of the run, though, was Matt W, having had several weeks to recover from his dominating performance at the 100k world championship race.

Several donut run groupies gathered at the fountain in Dupont Circle, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first runner. Martha, Aaron, Ryon and Tom were joined by Kerry, who brought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, so Doug could take the ice cream option for the run, and several more pints in case anyone else chose to do the same (Keith & Mario swung by during their WUS Normale to dip into Kerry’s ice cream).

The first runners to arrive were Jon L-D and Neal, neck and neck.  JLD got an early jump on the donut eating, but Neal’s strategic use of the Semen Collection Cup helped his later donuts go down extra smooth and he left the Circle first.  However, the donut bitsies churned up some activity in Neal’s intestines on R Street and someone’s yard got a little present there, allowing JLD to pass and finish victorious in a new record of 47 minutes.

We had considered Matty Woods to be a strong contender, but he forgot his light and tagged along with Sean, whose decades of junk food consumption should have poised him to seriously challenge Neal & JLD (apparently some long nights in the patent office during the end of the fiscal year set him back a notch or two).  Matty recommended that we up the donut intake to 8 at least — 6 was trivial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adam was a gentleman and waited for his fiance Robin, who stole the ladies championship, redeeming last April’s beer mile spewfest.

Doug found his pint of Ben & Jerry’s to be considerably more difficult to scarf than he’d imagined.

Since Seanie hadn’t RSVPed and we hadn’t bought him donuts, we had to make an emergency return trip to Krispy Kreme to get Kirstin donuts, although this turned out to be fortuitous because Jeff Reed also late-showed and needed 6 sugary goodnesses as well.

Here is JLD during the post-race sugar high: http://www.twitvid.com/XMBL5 and Neal Gorman’s post-mortem, continuing to enjoy his beverage container of choice http://www.twitvid.com/MLHI2.

VHTRC Women’s Half Marathon

Manassas, VA

September 10, 2011

Apologies for the delay in this posting.  Last week I wrote a lengthy report on the Women’s Half Marathon, saved it 4-5 times as a draft on wussies.net and then Poof it disappeared.  I’m not going to try to reconstruct that detailed report again, I’ll just be frustrated that I can’t recall exactly how I crafted it, but I have a few things I’d like to say.

First, I’d like to heap some praise on the volunteers and people who were along the course – not just for the usual general things like hard work and generosity of time, but for something more specific: tone.  I had a bit of a rough day out there: I’m worn out and undertrained from weeks of travel (Nepal, China, Malta, I’m writing now from Minneapolis); I’m still dealing with a foot problem that isn’t too painful to run but is too painful to run normally, and it’s set off a cascade of troubles in other areas and muscles; and maybe, as Keith Knipling so put it, ‘I’m distracted’ by some pretty life-altering recent events.  Throw on top of that getting my feathers all ruffled by some new unexpected competition, and I think everyone could see on my face that I was troubled early in the race.  I welcome a good race, but it’s a whole different thing to get blindsided by totally unexpected competition of an unknown quantity, especially on home turf with some high expectations on a day when you’re not physically sharp.

Maybe it’s because the VHTRC has a lot of experience offering words of encouragement to runners who are not looking too good deep into a long ultra, but the ‘cheers’ I received along the course were so welcomingly subdued and calm.  I say ‘cheers’ in quotes because they were subdued, calming, reassuring.  Having run since high school through throngs of parents screaming ‘go get ‘er!’ I can appreciate this greatly.

One of the things I liked least about high school cross country were the ridiculous things parents yelled at the runners, parents who didn’t know a thing about running (fortunately my own parents were not bad).  I could never understand why people would shout things at me like ‘She’s right ahead of you!’ as if I had a field of vision that was limited to 3 inches.  Fortunately my team knew to yell things at me like ‘Go, Martha!  Smack It!’ that would get me to crack a smile and relax, which was far more likely to get me in the mood to hunt down the competition than ‘Use your arms!’  Other inanely unhelpful lines included ‘Use the hill!’ and ‘Time to go!’  I know there are some classics there I’m forgetting so if anyone else can think of any more, please add to my list.  I think the best cheer I’ve ever heard is Penn State legend coach Harry Groves yelling at one of his runners to move up on the runner ahead with the line, ‘Sniff it!  Sniff that butt!’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cascade Crest 100

August 27-28, 2011

Easton, WA

‘Interesting choice of a pacer,’ Keith remarked to Aaron on the Friday before the start of the Cascade Crest 100 mile race in Easton, Washington.  For I, his pacer, was most known for being whiny, dependent, delicate, and with zero experience in long races.   On top of that I was having lingering stomach problems from my recent trip to Nepal that nearly kept me from boarding the plane to Seattle.

It has been fascinating to observe the power of preconceived notions and their ability to block out anything that deviates from one’s prefabricated order.  To someone outside of WUS like Monica Ochs, who crewed for CCC female victor Shawna Tompkins and joined Amy and myself in touring the course in Amy’s Civic ‘Bridget’, the natural question within the first hour of meeting me arose, ‘So is the guy you’re pacing your boyfriend?’  To which I answered, ‘Yes, he is, but it’s quite strange, no one knows.  You see, we don’t hide it, we act normally – he walks home with me after each Tuesday night group run, we’ve made numerous references to the ‘extra’ bed we have in our hotel room, and heck everyone knows I’m a princess and here I am flown across the country to wade through mountains for an entire night.  We’ve been waiting for people to use their own powers of inference to call us out on it.  But the closest anyone has come is that someone thought Aaron was showing up to all our WUS runs because he was having a fling with another male runner (who actually was a girlfriend himself).  I guess he gets some credit for noticing and wondering why in recent months Aaron has greatly increased his Tuesday night attendance.  But overall they’re all astonishingly oblivious.’

I knew that I would not be particularly adept at crew.  At the first crew-accessible aid station at Tacoma Pass Aaron asked me if I had his bag.  Not only did I not have his bag, but I didn’t even find out what it was he wanted so I could try to dig something up for the next crew-accessible aid station in 10 miles.  All the other crew people were leaping to attention, taking charge, disseminating instructions, asking the runner key questions – kind of how I imagined war would be.  Wives kissed their husbands, friends patted their runner on the back.  You know what I did when Aaron arrived?  I threw my hands in a V and exclaimed, Yea!  And remained standing exactly where I was beside Monica.  Then I admitted I had none of the materials Aaron was requesting and apologized profusely for being worthless.

Fortunately I did have a learning curve as the day and night wore on, and by the mile 68 aid station at Lake Kachess, where I was to start pacing, I had Aaron’s drop bag ready for him as well as extra drink powder mixes and shot bloks and felt proudly organized.  Although externally chipper and unfathomably polite, Aaron was not in great straights when I joined him at mile 68.  As we trotted off up the road to the ‘Trail from Hell’ Aaron explained that he had ‘no up and no downs’ and it was going to be a long 32 miles home with lots of walking.  But I was giddy to be out on the trails, talking a mile a minute as I recounted all the stories from the day, continually gazing up at a black sky freckled with so many stars that it was difficult to make out any of the known constellations (although the 7 tough miles of dirt road with 3,000 feet of gain to No Name Ridge provided more than enough time for us to identify Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia’s Chair, and the Seven Sisters as we plodded (and mainly walked) along).

It was not easy to watch Aaron navigate the ‘Trail from Hell’, groaning like an elderly patient as he tried to discern the easiest way to sprawl across the multitude of giant blowdowns (apparently late snows had slowed their removal by the forest service).  Always so unshakably positive-minded and rarely expressive about suffering, it was entirely unnerving to witness the pain take over him and his body.  I found myself getting increasingly angry at the course for having so many steep inclines (those damn Cardiac Needles!) that came in such gratuitous droves – couldn’t the trails be more merciful on my poor Aaron??

Somewhere along that relentless 7 mile dirt road climb I began to experience problems of my own in my right foot.  I have a history of coming down with plantar fasciitis when I have run at an unnaturally slow pace to accommodate another runner, something about altering my footstrike and coming down harder on my heels.  The pain alleviated somewhat when we returned to the softer trails after No Name Ridge, where Aaron also found new life and started running again, but I had to dance on my toes to spare the inflamed right heel (although it was impossible to complain too much given the state of Aaron’s much-abused body).

Overall, I discovered that I absolutely love to run in the night – it’s surreal, peaceful, and so beautiful with the clouds of stars and a faint outline of the mountains.  On barely any sleep I never got tired, never took caffeine, never got in bad spirits.  Although I’m still a bit perplexed how female runners plow through the night without imagining killer psycho rapist murderers around every blind turn — I would freak out.

And of course the best part about running through the night is getting to see the sunrise, which Aaron timed perfectly to coincide with the most scenic section of the course between Thorp Mountain and French Cabin, with a red ball of fire glowing over the Alpine Lakes Wilderness and Stuart Range.

Did I enjoy pacing?  Absolutely.  Does that mean I wish I’d run the other 68 miles?  Not really.  Does that mean I’ll never run 100?  Fortunately I don’t have to decide that today.

(Photos courtesy of Glenn Tachiyama)