Willis River Trail Race 35k/50k

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Bear Lake Park, VA

The Willis River Trail Race (formerly known as the Swinging Bridge 50k) was supposed to be a nice little confidence booster leading up to my much-anticipated crusade to redeem myself this year at Holiday Lake, after losing the lead last year in a fit of vomiting at the last aid station in what I consider the most demoralizing race finish of my life — even worse than the time I collapsed on Boylston Street in the last stretch of the Boston Marathon in 2009 (where I was able to get up and stagger across in 2:55 for 42nd place female).

Although I was able to cling on the win in the 35k at Willis River, and felt fluid and strong for most of it, the Barfies returned with a vengeance, representing a marked set-back in my long-running quest to become an ultra-runner (pun intended).  Overall it a great warm day and a fun winding course through Bear Lake Park, situated about an hour west of Richmond.  As Sean had warned me, everyone continually went off-trail and half the challenge was just staying on the darn course.  Just as I started to put a good gap on second place I would go off-course and end up behind her again — it happened at least three times.

But after 17-18 or so miles of pure cruising at Willis River, feeling completely in control of the race despite the off-course detours, it all started again.  It begins innocuously enough, with a soft gag on whatever I’m trying to eat.  A mile or so later it develops into a dry heave, where my stomach contracts hard and I just vomit a little into my mouth.  The next time I heave it all spills out of my mouth (I’d like to be able to claim it was a pretty projectile vomit like the one in the picture here, but really most of it just dribbled down my face, chest, and onto my knees).

The only difference between here and Holiday Lake was that there was a 35k option, so I knew that if I just toughed it out a couple more miles I could stop running and forget the last 10 miles of the 50k.  With a fiery determination to finish without giving up the lead I dug in and run through the dry heaves and at least 3 full-fledged vomits.

The trail went on interminably, twisting and winding, and at one point I seriously considered just curling up in a little ball on the side of the trail and taking a little break from the great unpleasantness for a while.  But I knew that Holly Bugin (winner of the UROC 50k, 4th at MMTR) was still on my heels (in part because I kept getting lost) and it wasn’t long to the finish.

As I approached the finish I started to vomit again, but slowed my pace down to hold it in.  But when I crossed the line I just let it all out in front of an audience of spectators and other finishers.  Some of their reactions were classic.  Our friend from Canaan, Luke, was there, and he gave me some water after I crumpled into a pile of wet leaves.  Aaron trotted in a little later and happy to screw the 50k, call it a day at 35k and go home.  I got some warm stuff on and was able to chat with some of the folks at the finish — Sophie and Mike Bailey (who’d twisted his ankle and dropped) and Caroline Williams (who’d gotten so lost she had to drop too), as well as Matt and Holly Bugin, whom I’d run part of the race with.  But ultimately I had to get my sick self home.

Where do I go from here?  I have deep reservations about revisiting what was such an awful experience last year at Holiday Lake, especially when I clearly have made no progress on fixing my stomach.  I’m really dejected because I love to trail race, and I’d love to move up into longer distances, even try a 50-miler.  I’ve got the half marathon trail run distance down pat, with a 4-for-4 undefeated win streak for half marathon trail races (3x WHM + 1 Dam Half), and I feel like there’s a lot potential in my legs to go the distance.  But I’m not going to slog through misery each time I run long.

I might try some different nutrition products.  I was recommended Hammer gels and Generation UCAN.  At first I thought Aaron’s suggestion that I skip the 50k and just jump to 50mi sounded crazy.  But maybe a longer, less intense cruise would be easier on the gut?   Heck, at this point I’m willing to try anything.

 

 

 

Q. How can a WUSsie score a big bear hug from a random blonde girl on the street?

A. Apparently by almost getting murdered by a beige Nissan on Porter Street in broad daylight.

Seriously, strangers on Connecticut Avenue were crying and hugging me in the street.  They had all seen it coming, probably in slow motion, from their perfect vantage point on the other side of Porter Street.  They saw the beige sedan blow through the red left turn arrow coming south on Connecticut Avenue and swerve left onto Porter, probably above 40 mph, just as I was blithely trotting through the cross-walk with the walk signal in my favor.  The sedan was coming from behind me, so I never saw it until it was an inch from my right hip.  By the grace of the running gods and a couple crucial inches, the car swerved by without contacting me.

But it was so close.  The pedestrians on the opposite side of Porter stood agape.  I think the near-murder they had just witnessed had terrified them as much as me. When I staggered the rest of the way across Porter, a girl with long straight blonde hair and thick black eye make-up hugged my shaking body so hard I thought she would never let go.  She must have been so relieved that my brains were still in my head instead of splattered on the road.  For nearly half a block people continued to pat me on the shoulder and make sure I was alright.  I was in too much quivering shock to make any response beyond a short nod and ‘uh-huh’.  Being in shock feels like scuba diving, when all you can hear is your own deep breathing, with a blurry world going by in slow motion.

My only regret is that the car was speeding too fast for me to get a license plate number.  I made a police report, and an officer was dispatched to Porter Street speed camera to see if the suspected vehicle had been caught on film.  I told the officer I thought it was a beige sedan, possibly Nissan or Toyota make.

As Sean Andrish can tell you from our Wednesday night runs, I am a magnet for lunatic drivers.  Although today’s incident was by far the most harrowing, this is by no means the first time I’ve been side-swiped by a car while obeying pedestrian law.  We have long joked about this phenomenon, and my attempts to combat my curse by wear bright yellow reflective clothing.  At least I’m a cat lady and get nine lives, although I have probably used up most of them by now.  Today alone counted for at least four.

 

We’ve previously determined that since Aaron is already practically perfect, he gets a bye on having to make any New Year’s Resolutions [although I might nominate something along the lines of: Try not to get so annoyed with Martha when she does something (a) dumb, (b) messy, (c) dumb and messy].  But I, to use one of those match.com-overused colloquialisms, remain a work-in-progress, and I’ve got some big ticket items for 2013.  Looking ahead, if I can avoid crumpling in a corner, 2013 in going to be a monster year: I’ve got work travel to Italy, Ireland, Scotland, Thailand, Australia, Minnesota, and Iowa (and that’s just through July 2013).  Potential trips to Myanmar and France as well.  If I’m not totally exhausted/out of shape from all this travel, Aaron and I are tentatively thinking of joining the Blue Train in June to the Black Hills of South Dakota for my first 50 miler (Aaron and the rest of the gang can do the 100).  I’m also considering making a major career move back into academia as a tenure-track assistant professor (of Biology), although I’m still waffling on that one.

I know that a 50-miler seems like peanuts to most of the WUSsies.  But I, for reasons I have explored in previous blogs, have a Grand Canyon-sized gulf between self-perceived and actual capability (with the former being substantially lower than the latter).  This incongruity has become increasingly apparent in recent years, in large part because Aaron is there to continually point out to me how out of touch my self-perception is with reality.  And I’ve only recently begun to realize that this phenomenon is quite rare and particular to myself — that other people actually tend to experience the reverse effect, developing inflated self-perceptions.  Psychologists refer to this as the ‘better-than-average’ effect: the vast majority of people think they are better than average, when of course that statistically is impossible.  As the classic example, an impossible 93% of US respondents described themselves as better than average drivers.  A year ago I went to a talk by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Hallinan who described this phenomenon in depth.  Over-confidence is a plague of human existence, leading not only to traffic fatalities but also a plethora of high error rates in other categories — from the surgery table to identifying suspects from the police line-up.  Tragically, these error rates could be dramatically reduced if people didn’t way over-estimate their own capabilities and allowed for greater measures of uncertainty.  As I sat in the audience, I was amazed by how different it must be to experience life through the eyes of someone with over-confidence — to be the guy who hits on the woman way out of his league at the bar, or who dashes out in the lead of a road race only to consistently fall to the middle of the pack, or to be the med student with enough self-assurance to think Yes, I’ve totally got the stuff to be a brain surgeon, to CARVE INTO PEOPLE’S HEADS. 

I thought that the easiest way I could gain self-confidence would be to achieve things I previously considered to be impossible or greatly challenging, over time eroding my sense of self-limitation.  For example, when I climbed Mt Kilimanjaro in 2002, overcoming this challenge should have boosted my confidence in an area I had always perceived to be a great weakness: climbing up hills.  Instead, my sneaky brain decided it was way easier to change my perception of the outside world than of myself: rather than giving myself any credit for the climb, my mind switched it around and concluded that summitting Kili was actually a fairly trivial physical endeavor that anyone and their spunky grandma could do.  My mind did the same thing about getting a PhD (trivial!), running a sub-3 hour marathon (just don’t go out too fast), or anything else that at one point had seemed like an insurmountable challenge. Much easier to change my perception of the external world than myself.

Anyway, the reason I have been probing into this issue of self-confidence recently is because I need to understand how it factors into an upcoming major career move.  As I start to consider ramping up my professional intensity by joining the tenure-track rat race, I’m determined to make sure that my reservations about the move are only related to lifestyle trade-offs and my reluctance to leave a current research position at Fogarty I’m very content with, and don’t stem from my lagging self-confidence and doubt about my ability to cut it as a professor.  Because I should know by now that I’ll be fine, that I always think it will be much worse than it really is.  There might be golden opportunities ahead at Georgetown University and at other divisions of the NIH, where I could have my own lab and little post-docs to boss around and do my work for me — and all I have to do is beat down that self-doubt hard enough until it’s too late to turn back.

~                ~                  ~

There is much about oneself that cannot be pinned on parental influence, and many traits that are largely independent of upbringing.  But self-confidence is one domain where parents figure mightily into and are greatly responsible for cultivating in a developing child.  Recognizing the origins of low self-confidence is crucial for beginning to reconstruct a sense of belief in oneself.  The absolute key here is for parents to inculcate in children a frame of mind where failure is not a reflection of lack of self-worth.  You can’t always make your kid be the winner, but you can surely teach them how to lose in a way that the failure doesn’t weigh them down like a giant scarlet F hanging from their neck.  Now I can think of one area where my father was actually a  spectacular success in teaching me to accept failure as a part of learning: skiing.  In stark contrast to the reviled tennis court, the ski slope was this wild, free place where I have no recollections of my father ever being disappointed or overly critical.  There was no scoreboard, no lines, no winners and losers, just big wide open hills to bomb down and enjoy.  I had skis on as soon as my feet were big enough to fit into ski boots, and pretty soon I was going down black and double-black diamonds, absolutely fearless.  My father had a rule that I should fall three times every day I skied — otherwise I wasn’t pushing myself and taking risks.   Normally kids will make fun of others who fall or fail, but my ski school instructors always created an atmosphere where huge face plants were celebrated with cheers.  The healthiest life lessons of my childhood were surely on those slopes, where falling on your face was greeted with a high-five and an outstretched glove to pull you back up, brush the snow out of your ears, and send you back on your way.  If only all of childhood could have been like that.

 

In sum: 2013 resolutions

(1) Run a 50-miler.  Try not to barf.  Okay, if you do barf, try to cut yourself some slack.  Faceplant, baby!!

(2) Explore career options.   Try to talk yourself up a little during interviews, even if you think you’re over-selling yourself.  Try to use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ when giving job talks, even if you consider the work to be a group effort.  If you decide to stay put at Fogarty, do it because you love taking off Thursday night to drive to Canaan Valley for snow adventures and don’t want to be tied to the lab, not because you think you’ll be Professor Suck Ass.

(3) Gain back your ‘god i’m so stressed over job applications!’ 4-5 pounds you lost.  Aaron’s totally going to trade you in for someone with a little meat.  Oh wait, Aaron doesn’t like meat.  But you do — so get yourself some T-bones, dammit!

 

 

 

Canaan Valley, WV

December 22-27, 2012

For several weeks leading up to our Christmas holiday in Canaan, Aaron had promised that There would be snow.  And how the Valley delivered!  Nearly 16 inches of fresh snowfall during our stay.  While there were many clear upsides to the snow in terms of winter sport adventure (see pictured, left), unfortunately the poor state of the roads interfered with the Operation Family Time that traditionally coincides with Christmas.  Aaron’s parents Dick and Rosemary could not come out for the ski weekend at Timberline they had planned with us for months.  And while my parents braved a harrowing drive to get to Canaan (my father had some strong comments about the quality of road plowing in various stretches of Virginia and West Virginia), the snow delayed their departure an additional day, stretching the limits of Nelson family harmonious co-habitation.

Most people are familiar with my wimpy princessy tendencies that preclude participation in events like Hellgate.  But when it comes to treacherous footing, I’m surprisingly game.  After getting our fill of snowshoeing, Aaron and I dropped the clunky footwear to take on the snow drifts with nothing but Nike, making it through the rocky Dolly Sodds with surprisingly good success (if you measure success by not falling on our butts rather than by miles covered).

Winter is so quiet when all the animals are gone.  Even the over-populated Canada goose population had long abandoned the nearby Spruce Island (‘Goose Poop’) Lake.   So when it’s cold and remote and you haven’t seen another person or even a squirrel for hours, the Eastern black-capped chickadee becomes a dearest of friends.  We spotted a few deer, a hawk, and some creepy flocks of giant wild turkeys during our adventures in the snow.  But the hardy little chickadee was the only consistent presence in those white woods, with its distinctive chick-a-dee-dee-dee call accompanying our travels throughout the day.  The xc ski area Whitegrass puts some birdseed out on benches that the daring chickadees dive in for even in our presence.  When new snowfall buried the seeds, I reached into my pocket for some peanut-butter crackers that our little friends deemed a very viable substitute.

D-day came on December 24th, with the storming of the Nelsons upon the gates of the Chophouse, along with the materials for the Christmas Eve Scandinavian smorgasbord, including Swedish meatballs, herring, pickled beets, and lingonberry sauce.  My father’s parents are from Finland and Sweden, so I grew up with Christmases that were steeped in Scandinavian traditions to a level verging on absurd.  For Christmas Eve we always produced an elaborate Scandinavian smorgasbord that included a number of foods I wouldn’t touch (like ‘veal jelly’, potato sausage, and pickled herring) and some foods I would nibble at (the meatballs and deviled eggs), while I mainly loaded up on a jello dish made by my grandma’s cousin Maiju.  If it weren’t for the rich rice pudding dessert we ate at the end, my caloric intake for Christmas Eve would have dipped below 250.  After dinner we would dance around the Christmas tree singing Finnish Christmas songs.  No one below the age of 60 knew any Finnish, but we knew all the songs by heart (or at least our Anglo-mangled versions of them) and when we were supposed to make bunny ears and tails with our fingers.  I clearly recall the semi-tormented facial expression and halfhearted staggering of my older teenage brother when made to take part in the Finnish bunny-dance songs.  Fortunately, Fred did not have to partake with me in the Santa Lucia pageant, in which I got dressed up in a white gown with tinsel wrapped around my head and waist and with a group of Scandinavian children performed traditional Swedish Christmas songs, including the Santa Lucia girl who wore a terrifying headdress of candles on her head.  I actually enjoyed the whole Santa Lucia thing, but I was always at a distinct disadvantage because I was the only child who did not actually speak Swedish.  I could stagger through a chorus or two of ‘Stilla Natt (Silent Night)’, but for the rest of the songs I had to scrawl their lyrics on the circular disk that kept the candle’s hot wax from dripping on my hand (except for the one Santa Lucia girl, the other girls just held single candles; the boys, who apparently couldn’t be trusted with flaming objects, were given wands shaped like stars to hold — and hit each other with).  I was able to read the lyrics off my candle holder for about half of the show (some of the other girls would lean over to read off my disk as well), but eventually the wax would drip and obscure my writing and we’d all have to count on the lone Santa Lucia to carry the show.

Christmas night it snowed even more, and my parents were unable to leave as planned the next day.  My father stayed home writing (apparently proving the existence of God, although not a Judeo-Christian we were told), but we, undeterred by the snowstorm, ventured off to Whitegrass for a long day of more adventure.  It even started to clear up at the end of the day, with a long rainbow stretching across the homestretch.

Magnus Gluteus Maximus Fat Ass 50k

December 15, 2012

Bull Run Park, Manassas, VA

 

In the days leading up to this year’s MGM, Sean was intent on getting me to run the Do Loop.  For the past couple years, I’ve always considered Fountainhead to be a very appropriate spot for turning my MGM Fun Run around, despite always returning to choruses of ‘What??  You didn’t do the Doooooo Loooooop?  You GOTTA do the Do Loop!’ when I got back to Hemlock.  For a while I imagined that the Do Loop had to be some beautiful scenic place with glorious views to warrant such emphatic endorsement.  So it came as a surprise when Aaron informed me that the Do Loop was nothing more than those craggy series of miserable climbs I ran in the early stages of the Women’s Half Marathon that went by that rusty junk-heap car.  I have less-than-fond memories of battling neck and neck with dear Eliza ‘still hasn’t returned my bladder’ O’Connor on that murderous stretch of trail back in 2011.

But when I got to Fountainhead this year, we were having such a good time — Sean, Keith, Aaron, Greg Z., Greg Z’s awesome ultra-running beagle-spaniel, and myself — that I continued on to the Do Loop without much cajoling, and ended up running the whole 50k.  Sean and I have been talking about doing a long run together for years now, and with the weather absolutely perfect and plenty of good cheer to go around (Greg Z. can TALK), I decided to strike while the iron was hot.  I particularly liked running the part of the course that overlapped with the Women’s Half Marathon — it was so pleasant to be able to relax and enjoy those stretches of trail, rather than race them with your heart pounding out of your chest.  I have a crazy crisp memory for what I was thinking about during any section of a race: I could recall the exact place in the race where my nose  twinged because I was so sad over my rapidly dying kitty, Waddle, who was diagnosed with feline leukemia on the day of the WHM.

But the take home lesson is: I’m not going to run long because people tell me I should, or because there’s some underwhelming view ahead, or because I’m training for anything specific, or because Sean whines a lot.  I’ll keep going as long as I’m having fun, as long as conversation keeps flowing and people keep laughing at my dumb jokes.  And there are lots of snacks along the way.