| The short version:
I had a lot of fun, ran 8:47. When I finished, I would have happily turned around
and run back to the start if my legs were up to it. They were not. Then YMO (Young
Master O'Connor) and I ran a 5K, after which he and his sister rode horses and
she had her foot stepped on by a real ass of a horse, which led of course to doughnuts.
The longer, print-it-out-and-read-it-on-the-toilet
version:
The race is the American River 50 Mile Endurance Run. It starts in Sacramento
and ends in Auburn, CA. There are more difficult 50 mile courses out there, but
as it was my first venture past 50K, it seemed difficult enough for me. It started
at 6:00 am. I was there at the start because that was the plan, which was this:
I would be at the start when the race started and run from there to the finish
where the race ended. I did the first part, all the middle parts (some of which
were very hard) and then the finish part—in that order, as it turns out.
The first half of this race is on a flat bike path, which leads to a lot of people
starting too fast and being gassed when it hits the tricky part—the trails
in the second half. I made a concerted effort to let all the people go by me in
the beginning. My friend Mike has these great quotes and the one I had in mind
was “Rolled ‘em up like a tortilla and spat ‘em out the back.”
Of course, he’s talking about a sub 6:00 mile in a 5k and I’m in a
blind panic because I’m dipping below 8:40 in something a tad longer. Anyway,
I let all the tortillas pass me by, figuring the rolling up and then the spitting
out the back would come later and with 50 miles. We had enough later to deal with.
Some miles rolled by and I crossed a bridge
over the American River and two really strange things happened. Out of nowhere,
“Everybody Wang Chung Tonight” started in my head. Now, I’ll
bet you think there’s no antedote for that. You’ll say, “Chris,
there’s no antedote for that—nothing to stop Wang Chung from Wang
Chunging in your head all day and if you’re just about nine miles into things,
you’re pretty much screwed. That’s a DNF is what that is. You just
became a tortilla, Chris. A big, overtrained tortilla.” Of course, you WOULD
have been right if it weren’t for…the goose. Yes, the goose. A Canada
goose, all pissed off, waddling down the middle of the path. He was crossing a
bridge in the middle of a group of runners and I swear to you, he had been holding
his own with a flock of runners drafting off him. His beak was open, his goose
tongue was hanging all out, full of goose contempt at the freeloaders. Sure, I
was behind a goose, but he was losing ground, having spent too much time at the
front of the peloton. He had nothing left at the other side of the bridge. He’d
honked at mile nine, that goose. I blame the training. That and he clearly had
the wrong footwear. Needed something with arch support, I think, as he was a tad
flat footed and needed the mother of all toeboxes. We all blew by the goose. He
was a tortilla out the back. Damn goose. Still—pissed or not—a goose
is always better than Wang Chung, which was by then nowhere to be heard.
More miles rolled by. I had some guys running
behind me at one point and overheard them talking about a sub 10:00 finish. I
was still working on the 7:30 pace (hrs), so these were definitely tortillas because
they were about a minute ahead of their pace. They were working off an uncalibrated
pedometer it turns out. We talked a bit and I dropped the bomb on them about the
tortilla thing and it being mile 13 and not at all mile 10 and the aid station
at mile 8.9 was actually at mile 8.9 and not 7 or so and all those facts put together
along with my GPS suggested the uncalibrated pedometer was not a very accurate
means of…well, anything really. And so they spat themselves out the back
about then. Nice fellas, though. Would have enjoyed their company.
My family (wife, Mrs.; son, Young Master O’Connor;
daughter, Little Miss O’Connor) was waiting for me at the mile 19 aid station,
high above the river, where I got a smooch from Little Miss on my sweaty head
and a promise for more filial support at Folsom Dam, eight miles hence.
The climb to the dam slowed me as I knew it would, but even so, I wasn’t
feeling as sprightly as I’d hoped. Being now a bit ripe as I pulled into
the aid station, my Little Miss was not of a mind to smooch any smoochable parts,
instead choosing to wrinkle her nose. Young Master however gave me a foot rub
as I switched into my bright yellow trail shoes. He’s a brave kid, that
kid. He’s decided to grow dreadlocks, don’t you know?
Left that aid station and immediately made
note of a blister. Wasn’t there and then it was. Such is running. Rolled
on through the next aid station and the one after that. Hit the mud properly and
collected a lot of water, mud and grit in my shoes which is EXACTLY what you want
when you’re working on blisters. Started climbing into the more technical
parts of the trail and slowed quite a lot. Did some hands and knees climbing over
rocks and ran through some really, really, really tricky bits. Here’s a
race tip for California trail running: If you don’t know what poison oak
looks like, it’s best not to learn how to identify it the night before the
race. Do this and you’ll spend all your time dodging the poison oak on the
left, only to crash through it on the right. See it on the right and you’ll
hit it on the left. There’s no avoiding it and in hindsight, I think I would
have preferred the temporary bliss of ignorance.
Climbed and climbed and climbed and got to
mile 34.5—an aid station named “Buzzard’s Cove.” Had some
Coke, because that’s what you do at an ultra aid station. It’s that
or Mountain Dew. You can look it up. Looked at my watch and pretty much waved
goodbye to my sub 8:00. It had made of me a tortilla and spat me out the back.
I was pissed. No goose to save me from this harsh reality. Well, ever onward…
Got to the mile 40 aid station and had to
change back into my road shoes and a fresh pair of socks because of the mud and
the grit and the blisters. The family was there and my Mrs. was kind enough to
point out that I wasn’t going to sub 8. And then she said one the Brians
had called, but she’d been out of cell phone range, otherwise she’d’ve
told him herself I wasn’t going to sub 8. She wrote his number down on her
calf so I could call back and tell him about not sub 8ing. She showed me her calf
where she’d written the number, but I thought that could wait, maybe. Then
the other Brian (my brother) called and she was in cell phone range that time
and they both between them agreed I wouldn’t be seeing a sub 8, which she
also told me about. (This was steeped in irony, because we were at the very aid
station where he’d just this past September found himself in a 100 mile
race and all of 43 minutes ahead of schedule by mile 12 already and you didn’t
see me calling up his ex-wife or anyone else for that matter and saying he was
a walking DNF, which he most certainly was, dammit. Of course, the predicted DNF
didn’t happen until 50 miles later, just after he’d passed through
that same damned aid station on the way back down again.) One of the guys from
the Gay and Lesbian Running Club sponsoring the aid station agreed with them both
about my sub 8 and then Little Miss wrinkled her nose again and I just said, “Hmmph,”
before running off in search of a sub 8:30. This is NOT a fortuitous aid station
for the my clan.
10 miles to go and I had made a bad miscalculation
about electrolytes. Here’s a running tip: When you’re in a marathon,
the Gatorade/Powerade/GU20 is fine and dandy. When you go past 30 miles, it isn’t
and the label on the electrolyte pills you wasn’t kidding when it said three
pills an hour, EVERY hour. Fail to do that and you’ll have some issues,
not the least of which is muscle cramping, so that in spite of the fact that you
trained 1,100 miles in just over 3 months for this puppy and got your quads in
great shape for the hills, the calves below the quads are part of your legs too
and don’t be taking them for granted. This tip brought to you by Pain, Inc.
So, the ibuprofen made the cramps not so painful, but they were there and making
it hard to get any lift in my stride. Still, t’weren’t any doubt about
finishing, just the time it was going to take.
At about mile 44-45, I crossed a little creek.
Tried to anyway. The left calf was suddenly struck by some manner of palsy, leaving
the foot below without any real direction, whereupon I learned “upright”
is merely a theory, yet gravity is ever a law—a fact ably demonstrated by
my sitting in the creek with a leg that wasn’t operating in accordance with
God’s design and was in fact, bent and locked in a manner not wholly comforting.
Here again, I was made a tortilla by a fellow that ran by, looked down to see
me thrashing around in the creek, hollering about Lord Only Knows What and just
decided it was best to pretend he’d never seen anything. The guy after him
stopped to help me up again (a trail thing, like stopping to offer some of your
spare opiates to someone lying in the fetal position as I had done twice already.)
We laughed about my pathetic state and got rolling again. That man was a great
man. He even said, “Hey, are these your sunglasses?” and bent down
to pick up something that turned out to actually be my sunglasses, which I got
from my friend Jamie The Physical Therapist and which I did not want to lose.
I headed off looking for satisfaction from the man who had no trail etiquette;
who was not a great man; who was in fact, a very, very bad man. He was to be Mexican
food within a mile or two. Vengeance may belong to God, but tortillas belong to
me, provided I’m faster than them, otherwise it’s the other way around.
Got to mile 46.7 and this is where anyone
with any life left in them gets it sucked out. You’ve run 46 .7 miles and
your gift is a 1,500’ climb in the last miles—most of it in this next
mile. Climb, bitch, climb!!! Here’s where I finally caved in and walked
a bit. Got to the last aid station (appropriately named Last Gasp) and saw the
very, very bad man. I ran and caught him, rolled him up like a tortilla from hell
itself and spat him out the back. I continued to run and passed another 10 people
or so, finally finishing the damn race. You know what’s probably a funny
thing to see? The thing that would in any other race be called a “kick,”
which in an ultra is when you go from a 13:00 to a 12:50 pace and the guy you
pass says, “Steroids’ll kill you, man! Stay off the juice!”
but you can’t hear him because of the great whooshing sound you think you’re
making as you rush by like Mercury himself. There’s a photo of me at the
finish, but it’ll be a cold day in hell when I let you guys see it. You
know when you’re running and it feels good and you get to thinking you might
look as good as you feel? I don’t get that feeling.
All I really wanted to do was turn around
and run back to the start, but my legs just wouldn’t let me. And that was
the test, really: to see if I liked that feeling at the end of fifty miles enough
that I’d want to try one hundred. And whaddya know? I did. I liked it that
much.
Got some scary blisters on my right foot,
but my legs are in great shape. In fact, Young Master and I went out the next
morning and did a 5K together. He PR’d by about 40 seconds. This was the
first time he ran the whole way. He loves the aid stations. It’s the whole
reason he does 5Ks. As we approached the table, I started to slow up a bit, expecting
him to come to a screeching halt, but he grabbed a cup and drank it on the run.
Train kept a rollin’, it did. Cool kid, that Young Master. After the race,
Young Master and I had a bagel with the only 9 year old who beat him and it turns
out that kid’s uncle ran the AR50 as well. Young Master asked why the uncle
wasn’t there at the 5K. Cool kid, that Young Master. Braggin’on his
dad, he was.
Then we got back and we all went off to the
kids’ horseback riding lessons, during which Young Master displayed his
astonishing lack of form and total comfort atop a horse. Never seen a kid so comfortable
on a horse and have such bad, bad form. Simply awful. Legs and arms all over the
place. Looks like he’s trying to drive a bulldozer, but you could leave
him on a horse for a week solid and he’d never fall off. I blame his uncle.
While Young Master was up on Rever, Little Miss was riding Quest—or rather,
sitting on Quest, because Quest does a fine impression of a fireplug most of the
time and is not inclined towards foreward motion. When the lesson was over and
she was putting him back in his stable, Quest stood on top of Little Miss’
foot, which prompted a noise I would have thought only dogs can hear, but it turns
out dads can hear as well for just a moment before their brains pop. Quest is
a small horse/fireplug, so he only needed a hard shove to move off Little Miss’
foot. Thus freed, Little Miss wrinkled not just her nose, but furrowed her brow
as well and I could see it coming. The previous lesson, it wasn’t Quest,
but Lily who had thrown her (she’s had a bad run of it lately. These horses
don’t behave like the ones in her horse story books. Those ones are all
sweet and devoted to a kid.) After that, Kristen The Horse Lady informed us that
ice cream is the standard balm for getting “throwed.” So, ice cream
it was then, but this time it turns out it was doughnuts with sprinkles. Little
Miss is probably secretly trying to find a way to make sure one of the horses
bites her next week, because I think the third time, you get your own pony.
That night, we watched the documentary about
the Badwater 135, “Running on the Sun.” The Badwater race director
says people who plan and scheme and train and have goals and the like are not
the ones who should run Badwater because they won’t finish. He said, if
you find yourself daydreaming about it, you should run it. At that point, my Mrs.’
eyes got wide with recognition and looked up from her knitting, and over at me
and said, “NO!”
Later that night, I had to paint Little Miss’
toenails, which is something I do. |
