I hadn’t run an ultramarathon in four years. The last time I did Highland Sky I had food poisoning. A bad hamburger had me laid out on the couch for days. I decided to be a hero and run anyway. Salmonella 1, Marmot 0.
But I decided it was high time to end my ultra draught. I owed the Sodds big time, and was ready to suffer a little on those trails. The last year has been a multi-stage journey of having a first child (euphemism for ‘total shit-show of blasting my body open and then ripping my life apart’). But every time I thought I was done for, the Sodds perked me up.
The Dolly Sodds became my refuge through all the ups and downs of pregnancy. So as soon as Bjorn was 5 weeks old, when we dragged him out there. And kept dragging him through winter. Because in West Virginia, you’re free to be whatever kind of mom you want to be.Apparently I’m the kind that doesn’t worry too much about ice.
Bjorn is now ten-months old, everything is groovy (thank you, infant formula!), and running Highland Sky seemed like the best way to express my gratitude to those trails and how important they were in getting me through some rough patches of severe morning sickness and postpartum depression. I don’t think it should be called ‘postpartum depression’. I think it should be called ‘natural response to the sudden downgrade from Pregnant Lady Pampered Like a Queen to New Mom Serving Her New Master’s Impossible Needs Like a Slave.’
Things didn’t start off easy. I hated those three months of breastfeeding more than I’ve hated anything in my entire life. It was hard to bond with a creature that was causing me so much suffering. But formula changed everything and Bjorn and I are best buds now.
Highland Sky Question #1: Would you rather be a marmot or a puffin?
Trevor (aka Tropical Puffin) and I finished Highland Sky each envying the other’s racing style. Puffins consistently perform at high levels by having a tight lid on their emotions, keeping their cool in the face of adversity, and generally making very difficult things look easy (like 200 mile races). On the other hand, Marmots are kind of hot messes. They run on fire and emotion. They vomit everywhere. Their emotions oscillate from exhilaration to whimpers to fury. And that’s just in five minutes.
From my vantage point, on my hands and knees in the grass by the finish line, barfing into a puddle, Trevor’s cool and collected running style seemed to offer a lot of advantages. I think most runners would agree with me.
Trevor rocks out to Dave Matthews
I’ve actually been trying for a decade to run more like a Puffin: less fire, more ice. During Highland Sky I repeated a couple mantras over and over to try to pull myself into a Puffin state of mind.
Mantra #1: Just cover the distance, best you can.
I would take a deep breath and try to remind myself that running Highland Sky isn’t about racing other people. Or breaking records. Or living up to your seeding. It’s about setting out to cover a pre-specified point-to-point course, with all its beauty and varied challenges, the best you can on that particular day.
Mantra #2: Manitou’s! Manitou’s!
Manitou’s Revenge is the only trail race where I’ve really been able to fully achieve that just-cover-the-distance mentality. Simply because it’s such a man-eater of a course. So I found myself chanting Manitou’s! to try to pull myself back into that mentality.
Mantra #3: I can slog for miles…and miles…and miles…
When nothing else is working, sing a lil Who.
Well, here’s a poke at you You’re gonna choke on it too You’re gonna lose that smile Because all the while……
I can slog for miles and miles I can slog for miles and miles I slog for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles Oh yeah!
But while I struggle to try to be a little more Puffin, maybe there’s a part of Trevor striving to be a little more Marmot. Not necessarily the part where I threw up my whole stomach at mile 32. Or in the first half of the race where I was feeling sorry for myself for feeling sick and lousy and getting passed by everyone and planning to drop at the midpoint (Bjorn — and his momma — have been fighting respiratory infections all spring). Or those many miles I spent fuming about certain people at work. Because that’s a great way to conserve energy during a long race when you’re not feeling well. But having a little more fire in the belly can come in handy in the homestretch.
Robin enjoys a second wind in the second half.
With four miles to go, Aaron told me the lead woman was only two minutes ahead. I could just see her off in the distance down the road.
Brain: Let’s win!
Legs: Very funny.
Brain: This is it! Reel ‘er in!
Legs: May I remind you that we’ve been running for, um, 7 hours. Through knee-deep mud. Over mountains. Boulder fields. Nettles. That damn Road Across the Sky.
My legs had certainly not forgotten the 7-mile Road Across the Sky.
Brain: Yes, but….
Legs: And you’re sick. You’ve been coughing all week. You have a baby. Full of germs. You haven’t slept right in months.
Cute little germ factories.
Brain: But that’s not at all how the story goes. This is where we win. Cue the music!
Legs: You just threw everything up like 3 miles ago. We’re running on empty.
Legs: Honey, this ain’t no 5k. Let’s toss your script. Welcome to the real world, where you haven’t run this far in 4 years. Where you did a grand total of 1 training run over 20 miles. And where, I hate to break it to you, that girl up there ain’t cracking. So let’s try to rein in the crazy and settle for a respectable second.
In the end, my brain conceded. As much as I wanted a comeback, to show that I still had my old pop even after having a baby, I gave in to realism. I tried put myself into a position where I could pounce if the lead woman faded. But she held strong, running all the hills, even through that awful thick grass at the end. We were both moving well and passed a couple of guys who were struggling at the end. Over the years, my finishing kick has gotten me out of so many jams. But not after 40 miles.
Finish area carnage, in order of suffering (left to right). I’m sure you can recognize Mario in his familiar position.
Sometimes you just have to be happy to cover the distance. And we had a killer women’s field, with Robin, Sheila, and Katie W. rounding out the top-5. Not sure when Highland Sky will again see such a deeply talented group of women filling out the top-5.
Smiley Shelia has definitely figured out how to Puffin.
I smiled as I finished, genuinely happy to get a big hug and finally be able to collapse. I couldn’t get up for a very long time. Except momentarily to spew again.
It was a while before I could stand. Or even sit up. Bjorn took it all in stride.
Highland Sky Question #2: How many Canada geese would it take to kill you?
I like perversities. When things turn out curiously the opposite of what you expect. As a recent example, Aaron and I discovered that having a baby actually made us more likely to join group runs. Our ten-month old Bjorn gets full credit for us finally making our first Pub Run in Thomas, WV in February. And it wasn’t because new parents are in desperate need of alcohol.
No, the explanation is pretty simple. In the past, the biggest barrier to joining group runs was the early start times. We had the whole day to kill and weren’t getting anywhere by 8am. But now we have our own little human alarm. It doesn’t matter if we put Bjorn to bed at 6pm or 9pm, he starts chirping at 6am every morning. Now we can finally do Sundays in the Park.
Joining group runs means meeting new people and getting invited to more group runs. By doing the Pub Run, we learned of Katie’s plan to do a FKT on the 24-mile North Fork Mountain trail. A trail that Aaron had always wanted to do. And which would apparently be the first documented FKT in West Virginia. How could we say no?
Running NFM trail south-to-north is mostly downhill, but there are some walkers. (That’s it for trail info. For useful course information ask Lucas for his nicely detailed FKT write-up.)
Bjorn’s 6am wakeup call eliminates a primary barrier to group runs, but introduces a secondary barrier: childcare. One of my major roles as Momma Bjorn is to direct his weekly circus of caregivers, who punch in and out in 4-5 hour shifts. Bjorn is extraordinarily accustomed to being in the arms of different people.
One of those people is Gary, Aaron’s boss. Gary’s main charm is his extreme enthusiasm for certain things (from the Washington Capitals to a certain Greek pizza). Fortunately for us, he has recently directed his enthusiasm towards Bjorn. Who, we must admit, is the world’s biggest charmer of a baby. Still, it was a big ask to have Gary come out to WV for an entire weekend and babysit for a good chunk of a Saturday (we left at 6:45am and returned around 3pm). We spent a portion of our run wondering if Bjorn had managed to bite Gary’s nose.
Bjorn uses cuteness to help recruit babysitters.
Childcare issues aside, the chief challenge of running the North Fork Mountain trail seems to be the logistics of shuttling folks on a point-to-point course. There were at least 20 emails exchanged about this particular problem, none of which I read (no human has enough bandwidth for baby AND vehicle logistics).
Eight of us met at a designated parking lot, including some WV folks I already knew (Lucas, Adam, and Katie) and some new out-of-towners (Tom, Todd, and Kate). We met our 9th guy Bill at the trail head. I didn’t quite understand whether the FKT was intended to be run socially, maybe running as a couple groups and maybe splitting more at the end, or whether everyone was supposed to go balls-out. I realized it was the latter when Bill took off before we’d even finished our group photo at the trailhead.
No Bill.
Being pregnant and having a baby takes you down a couple notches. It had actually been two years since I had done a mountain run over 20 miles. Or any run over 20 miles, for that matter. Fortunately, Aaron and I are into equal parenting, and he felt just as beat-down as I did. I didn’t pressure him, but I was secretly hoping he would just take it easy and run with me.
I fished my wish, and Aaron and I ran together start to finish, setting a new FKT on the trail for women (4:06). The men’s FKT was set by Lucas (3:10), who earned the moniker ‘Honey Bear’ because he ran the entire trail carrying nothing but two 10oz plastic bear-shaped honey containers filled with water. Boy’s a camel. I had two large water bottles, went totally dry, and spent the last hour or so feeling loopy, thirsty, and feeling like there was a reason I had been keeping my runs short lately. Most of the North Fork trail coasts along a forested ridge line with good tree cover, but it was an unusually hot day with strong sun. Aaron and I went off course for about a mile on a hilly and completely exposed gas pipeline, and that took some wind out of the sails. Apparently we weren’t the only ones to succumb to the heat. Tom went miles off course and got so loopy he started hallucinating and asking perplexed hikers on the trail if they had any margaritas.
At least there were killer views on our silly pipeline detour.
Coming back to running after having a baby is a gradual process. I’m almost completely physically recovered from childbirth and pregnancy (thank you, pelvic PT), but there’s a lot of mental fatigue. I found myself having a hard time staying focused on the trail, which was mildly technical (at least by WV standards). Aaron noticed how I uncharacteristically kept stumbling on rocks and roots and coming frighteningly close to falling, even at the beginning of the run. Highland Sky is coming up in three weeks, and while I do believe I’m physically capable of covering the 40 miles (even if this FKT attempt was my only training run), I worry about being able to stay mentally focused for that long.
I had to steal at least one view. Too gorgeous.
The best thing about getting hot and dehydrated on a long run is how good it feels at the end to recover. I told Katie I would do any run she wanted me to as long as it ended with sipping a beer in the sun at the lovely waterhole we found at Seneca Rocks. ‘We’ refers only to the diehard waterholers, as Aaron and others decided the creek was too cold. I’ll admit, it was frigid and you couldn’t stay in long. But Todd made my day by swimming beers across the creek to the opposite side where we were sunning on rocks. Pro gear tip: Altra shorts have perfectly beer-shaped mesh pockets for transporting up to four cold ones.
Lucas and I wait for the rest of the crew to finish. Mostly so we can eat their snacks.
Maybe it was the beers, but we all agreed we would definitely do the North Fork trail again, and maybe make an annual tradition of it. If I ran it again, I know I could easily slash my FKT time by doing simple things like (a) not going a mile off course (maybe Go Big this time and actually glance at a map the night before), and (b) having at least one prior mountain long run as training. A cooler day would help too. And a little less new-baby-sleep-deprivation. But it would also be fun also just to run it socially and with a chance to stop for all the beautiful views along the ridge. I stole enough peeks through the trees just to have a sense of what I was missing.
Acknowledgments: 1- Katie (event organizing), 2- Aaron (gamely running with me), 3- another guy named Aaron, friend of Bill’s (supplying a gatorade at the finish when all my stuff was in car parked elsewhere — I told you the shuttle stuff was complicated), 4- Todd (swimming beers over at the water hole).
I was barely a mile into the run when I started clawing at my shirt, trying to tuck it into my sports bra so my belly could breathe a little.
I opted for the more lady-like belly shot.
The day before at VHTRC’s Bull Run Run 50-miler, they’d had a record number of drops. The air was thick with humidity, it just sapped all your energy. Folks were droppin’ like flies.
2018 WUS baby crop (Hanging out at the BRR finish line is so much better than running the race.)
But let me tell you: a crap day at a Backyard Burn 10-miler is so many Everests better than a crap day at Bull Run Run. On top of the muggy weather, our whole family’s been sick lately, and Aaron also had a terrible day at the Boston Marathon. But the joy of putting my ultra runner days behind me (I’m making a small exception for Highland Sky in June) is that when I feel like death, 1 hour is so doable compared to 10 hours.
Trevor, the posterboy for BRR tending to be a suckfest. (Seriously, Trevor, this was the best of the lot.)
The race began auspiciously when found my first four-leaf clover of 2019 at the start line. I handed it to another Reston pal Frank, and wished him a good race. And I went out hard, really wanting to run with Brady. But I realized quick the legs just didn’t that day, and quickly scaled it back.
I guess I have to keep running these damn things until I finally beat Brady. (Brady was 1st overall; I ended up 3rd overall/1st woman)
The Backyard Burn course loops around Lake Fairfax Park, hitting all the great landmarks: the lake, the water park, the cricket grounds, the soccer fields, the RV park, and, of course, the back of Aaron’s house, which he still owns as a rental property.
At first, I had not been impressed when Aaron told me he lived in Reston. ‘Reston’ had been a dirty word growing up. One of the traumatic events of my childhood was when my grandparents sold their lovely stone house on 10 wooded acres in McLean and bought a cheap townhouse next to a highway in Reston. It was walking distance of the Town Center and thought to be more practical. I sulked every time we visited.
You can learn a lot about someone from their home. Aaron’s house was peppered with surprises. A far cry from the dirtbag trail runner bachelor pad I was expecting. I marveled at the fancy soaps in the bathroom. And glasses that had been bought from a store as a set, not just an sundry collection from different athletic events. The only whiff that a runner lived there was upstairs you had the Grubby Nap Room. An entire master suite with no furniture dedicated solely to collapsing on the carpeted floor when you’re too tired to shower after a long run. Brilliant. And the back door led to a new-growth forest that was sliced in every direction by mountain bike trails.
So many memories running around this lake with Aaron 8 years ago when we started dating.
The whole race was made possible because Aaron still has lots of running friends in Reston. Lindsey, Gary, and their daughter Ava were are the world’s best babysitters and took care of Bjorn all morning. The outer suburbs are kind of weird, and full of some really terrible chains restaurants. But I miss Reston’s forests, and trails (with working water fountains, no less), and friends. And how darn quick you can tick off an entire errand list. Without even paying for parking.
It is a strange thing to grow up the daughter of Bob Nelson. On one hand, being the daughter of a Libertarian is pretty great fun. There are no rules. No limits on junk food, or how much TV you can watch. We believed in no religion, no God, only in one power: the human mind. Whether or not you agreed with my father’s particular views, you cannot deny that his energy for ideas was contagious, as was his core belief that you could reshape the entire world simply by thinking freely.
My father invited unconventional thoughts. So while I know it’s not how most people in this room might feel, I have to admit I’m quite at peace with the timing of my father’s death. My father was afraid of very few things, but losing his mental faculties was one of them. He’d watched both his parents go senile, and he did not want that for himself. As far as we know, he had no inkling that he was dying. He was found still sitting on a chair at his desk. My son Bjorn is less than a year old. There is a part of me that is very sad he won’t get to know his grandfather. Bob won’t see his grandson try out skis, or hit a tennis ball, or make his first steps. But aging is not what my father wanted. And when life began to ask him to slow down, I’m okay with him instead blasting off.
Let me tell you a story about what happened one time Bob was asked to slow down, quite literally. When Claire and I were teenagers, my father took us to Zimbabwe. My father liked a lot of things about Zimbabwe, but the speed bumps were not one of them. They were everywhere. To everyone else, this was a nuisance. To a Libertarian, this was a battle cry. He decided the best way to deal with the bumps was to……floor it. He explained if the car could get enough speed, we’d cruise right over. Pure physics. Claire and I flew so high our heads hit the roof. We squealed as he did it over and over again. He was convinced that if he just went a little faster it would work. We learned two lessons that day. Lesson 1: Always try to beat the Man; Lesson 2: Bob is crazy.
A particularly striking symbol of how little interest Bob had in slowing down is actually this house here in Shepherdstown. Most people my father’s age are very practical, and actively preparing for a time when they won’t want to mow lawns or climb steps. When it came time to decide whether to rebuild Shepherdstown after the fire, every sane person told him it didn’t make sense for someone his age to build a second home on 10 acres. With the world’s most high-maintenance tennis court. Not only did Bob go ahead and rebuild the house, he resurrected the rickety log path that goes down a mud cliff to the river. Perfect for taking gin and tonics on.
A couple years ago Aaron’s parents invited Bob on a club ski trip where they learned firsthand how hard it is to slow Bob down. My father hadn’t been skiing in decades. But he went out there and barreled down the mountain just like he did 20 years ago: no turns. With a lot effort they got him to use goggles so he could at least see objects he needed to not hit. Snow pants or helmet? As if.
My family has had quite a bit of grieving this year, with the deaths of both my father and his mother Irene. One of the ways that I make peace with these losses is to focus on the parts of them that live on. I’m a very different person from my father, but I will always be proud to be a Nelson and from a culture that values intellectual curiosity. In my father’s honor I promise to renew at least a couple of the magazine subscriptions he’s bought me over the years. He would never tell me. One day the London Review of Books would just pop up in the mailbox. Because you know what new working moms need? More political reading material. Speaking of mail, do you know who is really mourning the loss Bob? Amazon. Have you ever shown up at our house without a package on the steps? I will never amass a library like that, but I promise to always question the conventional wisdom. I promise to devour as many lobsters as possible in a single sitting. (Uncle Jeffrey, I’m turning 40 in two years, and I’ll be polishing off that 4 pound lobster in Bob’s memory. We have a date at The Palm.) And, most importantly, if someone ever dares put bumps in my road, Dad, I promise to gas it.
