Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 15:16:25 -0600 From: Alex Feldman Subject: White River 50m When will I stop being intimidated by these things? Races, I mean. It was the same thing at the other three races in which I competed; a 10K, a half-marathon, and a marathon. Everyone else seems to exude a confidence born of familiarity, while I desperately search for something to do while I wait for the breifing. I ought to have gained some confidence by now, but I suppose I ought to have washed the dishes before I left the house, too. The running regime began early in the spring of '93 as a way to get into shape for the hiking season, and to lose some weight. I never intended to race, but I got goaded into it, and eventually ran a marathon in May. I finished it comfortably under 3 hours, which was my goal, and that left me wondering what to do next. I didn't have to wonder for long, since Dave Ferguson, my spiritual beacon throughout my running experience, started talking ultra as he drove me home from the finish line. Dave had to stop running after he finally let the physician take an x-ray and confirm what they both must have known; that he had no hip whatsoever left. I think he gets vicarious enjoyment from having a protege who is active, although having the sport so close to him and yet so far is probably not altogether pleasant. He had no interest in accompanying me to my first ultra. Dave doesn't really look like like a natural athlete, and I suspect that's because he isn't. Rather he is one of those people with uncanny mental strength, which he can use to completely block out pain if he wants to. I am not such a person, and the notion that this might be a particularly valuable skill for an ultrarunner gave me pause. Still, the marathon was a positive experience overall, and I did better than I thought I would, so why not double the distance one more time, and see what happens. Besides, Dave resorted to that very effective form of persuasion, flattery, and he snowed me. I borrowed a copy of Ultrarunning from Dave's brother Chuck, onetime holder of the North American 24 hr. record, but now also retired from the sport, and looked for some nearby 50 milers. There weren't many, but one that looked promising was the White River 50, a trail run with 9000' of elevation change. It was scheduled for July 30, which would give me time for a month of hard training after I got back from traveling towards the end of June. I called and arranged to enter, and then got down to training. Oh my God, the training. Some people are impressed by the fact that someone would run 50 miles, but the really difficult part, in my opinion, was preparing for it. Boise is ringed with foothills that rise 3-4000' above the valley, and I had always enjoyed running in them. My standard run was a 12.2 mile round trip that involved a 3000' climb and descent, it was an invigorating way to begin a day, and most important, my dog liked it. It probably sounds ridiculous, but on the weekends at least, I wouldn't want to run anywhere that wasn't a suitable playground for my dog. Anyway, 12 miles is fine if you're just trying to stay in shape, but it is not enough to train for 50, so I had to look for more. The sensible thing would have been to run the same old route more than once, working up to three times before the race. That way I would have gotten plenty of hill work, and more important, could have used my car as an aid station. My dog wouldn't have minded, this would have given her a chance to really sniff the place out properly. But virgin territory beckoned, and I decided to make a pure run of it, starting and finishing at my house and doing a big loop, rather than an out-and-back from the car. This meant I would have to carry more water than I intended to carry in the race (where I only carried one bottle), which was a big departure for me since I had never before carried any water at all. The runs from the house were murderous, particularly as the day got warmer. As the loops got bigger, I had to stash a gallon of water half way, since I just couldn't carry enough for the whole trip. Well, armed with a much more intimate knowledge of the jeep roads in the foothills than I ever dreamed I would have, race day approached and with one week to go, I began to taper. No big run on Saturday, rather I headed off to the Sawtooths with a friend and climbed Mt. Cramer. As the day began I felt a slight tingling in my knee, but as we started down the mountain it got quite bad. Disaster!! Monday saw me in a sport medicine specialist's office, and to make a long story short, he said, "try it, and be ready to drop out". No running that week, just a little weight training to try to strengthen the knee and keep myself sane. But as race day approached, I began to lose heart. All that training, and now this. And in the back of my mind lingered the thought, is this it? Was last friday the last run of my life? And thoughts like that linger there still, for while the knee seems to get no worse, neither does it seem to get better. The day before the race. I loaded the car with camping equipment, several pairs of shoes, carbo drinks, an ice pack, and various other minor items. I had been carbo-loading and preparing as best I could, but now it was time to drop off my dog with her former owners and make the trek. It was a nine hour drive to a campsite near the start, including time out to stretch every few hours. I had my liquid meal for dinner (liquid meals 24 hrs before seemed to me to be a good way to reduce the chance of having to scurry off the trail, but no one else seems to do this), got a decent night's sleep, and at a few minutes before 5 the next morning I rolled into the parking lot which was the start/finish and staging area for the race. I was a little surprised to see such a beehive of activity more than an hour before the start. I suppose I shouldn't have been, since while I drank my breakfast at my solitary campsite, everyone else was enjoying each other's company while they got ready for the event. I checked in with RD and ultra member Chris Ralph, who inquired about my knee (I had posted a query here) and I told her, somewhat sullenly, that I did not expect to finish. At least I had a built in excuse, and I was pretty sure I would make it half way since if the knee didn't bother me on the way up the first hill, and then if I got down somehow, that would be half. So by now I had almost an hour to feel sorry for myself and panic. Delightful. I thought about emptying my bowels, but then decided to leave that until after the briefing. I pinned the number to my singlet, took two ibuprofin, and started checking out the equipment. First the shoes. My New Balance 860's were definitley on the lightweight side. Perhaps I should change to my Asics gel 120's? No, just leave those in a drop bag for the half-way point. Then the shorts; regular athletic shorts had the edge over tights, so I was normal there. Next to shirts. Alot of these were obscured by warm-up clothing, but I could see that I had one of the few singlets. What's goin' on here?! I bought this singlet after shriveling up under a cotton T-shirt in the half-marathon I ran, and I was glad I had it for the marathon. Now I was supposed to go back to a T-shirt? I put T-shirts in the drop bags alongside the polypro and thermax shirts I had brought for the high points of the run. Finally hats. Almost everyone seemed to have a hat. Living as I do, in the desert, I understand the value of a hat. But we weren't running in the desert, and I didn't expect to catch more than a half-hour's worth of sun during the first half of the course (which proved correct), so into the drop bag with the hat. I had spent hours trying to memorize the course description, and had a copy of it with me, but during the breifing we were told to just follow the survey tape. I resolved never to try to memorize a course description again, a resolution I am sure I will break with the next race. The breifing started late and ended with about five minutes until the start, not quite enough time to find the boy's room and defecate. But just about exactly enough time, as it turned out, to find a bush and do the same thing. I jogged back to the starting line, facing the pack, just as the start signal was given. I let most of them pass and joined in. Adreniline means never worrying about how stupid you look. The race itself is something of a sentimental blur. I decided that if I was only going to run half of this thing, I might as well go fast, so I moved up to the front half of the pack before we hit the first trail and had to go single file. From there I just paced along, wondering how long we would remain in this clump, when someone came up behind me and asked to pass. I let him by, and followed as he passed everyone else in the pack. When we got to some open space, I stayed with him for about a half mile, before I decided that I would have to find someone else to pace on. Steve (that was his name) moved on ahead, and I only caught increasingly sporadic glimpses of him through the trees. I ran on, and presently caught up with three more guys running together. I was happy to join the train, but two of them almost immediately moved aside to let me pass. I did, but told the one in front I was happy to pace off them, if they were willing to have me. The fellow in front was named Mark, and the fellow immediately behind me named Ray. I don't remember the third fellow's name, he fell off our pace shortly thereafter. Mark had run the race not only in the preceding year, which was its inaugural year, but the year before that in the preview. Ray had been on the U.S. racewalking team and I think he said he had placed 10'th in the world one year. I thought I was probably out of my depth running with these guys, but why not try... The three of us climbed to the first aid station, a water-only stop at 10+ miles, where we got some water (only). Then we moved to the only significant out-and-back leg of the course, a 4 mile jaunt to an aid station. On that portion of the course you get to see everyone else, and we saw that we were about eight minutes behind the leader (Steve, my early pacing partner) and about six minutes behind the guy in second (John, who wasn't wearing a hat!). We were three, four, and five. At the aid station I got some more liquid, but didn't eat anything, which was probably a mistake, but it was the way I trained. It was at the second station that I began to notice a trend that I didn't like; the volunteers were treating me far better than I was treating them. The two people at the water-only stop had been rather subdued, so when they gave me water I thanked them and moved on. They were nice people, but they seemed to be enjoying the bucolic innocence of their location, so getting in and out fast seemed like the polite thing to do. But at the full service stations, with food and drink and first aid and drop bags, people wanted to be helpful. They were tremendously supportive, clapping, whistling, and calling me by name, and all I could do was muddle around incoherenly and mutter "thank you". I suppose they are used to it, but it bothered me a bit. It was also right near this station, which was the top of the first big hill, that I told Mark and Ray that the three of us would finish 3, 4, and 5. Mark said he knew the field and that that wasn't going to be easy. I tried to run down the hill fast, and left Mark and Ray a little behind me. The doctor I had seen about my knee had said to go downhill fast, which was counterintuitive enough that I thought there must be something to it. I stopped again at the water-only station, and headed down, Here my lightweight shoes betrayed me, as I stumbled and fell, and picked up the beginnings of some or all of my blisters. The trail was steep (and in places, wet), and I just had a very hard time maneuvering. It was not at all like the jeep roads I was used to. At the bottom of the hill we had to cross the state highway. Several volunteers aided us in this, led by a fellow named Sparky. Sparky took the job of getting the traffic to stop quite seriously, and I was quite happy to have him there. From there it was less then a mile on a trail near the highway to the next aid station. I didn't really think about my knee and quitting at this point. I figured it wouldn't get any worse until the next big downhill, and I could live with that. Besides, it had paced me going down, which may not have been all bad. From the half-way aid station it was about a mile on the "flat" before we started the second big climb. I put flat in quotes because although there was no hill of more than ten feet on this stretch, like the other "flat" stretches on this course it was full of little bumps and holes, roots and rocks. Not good for the knee or the feet. Along this stretch Ray caught me, and we ran together for a while until he left after about a mile of uphill. I was exhausted at that point, low on blood sugar and stumbling badly. The next aid station, at about 28+ miles, was only four miles past the last one but the most welcome one of the bunch. I got two more ibuprofin, which I had forgotten to ask for at the previous station, and ate a lot of food. Mark caught me just as I was leaving. The two of us ran to the top of the second hill, and another aid station. They told us we were 45 minutes behind the leaders, and 10 minutes behind Ray. We ran down fairly fast, doing the 6.2 miles to the bottom in under 45 minutes, where we hit the second to last aid station. Early in the day, on the first hill, we didn't see very many people on the trails. That's partly because they weren't there, and partly because it was so foggy that we probably wouldn't have seen them had they been there. Rainier was just like I remembered it when I climbed it in June 1990, absolutely invisible. On that trip, most of the 30+ climbers who were at Muir camp the night before DNF'd, and even when we made it to the top, we had to crawl around a bit to convince ourselves that we had found the crater. But the day had changed by the time we got to the second hill. Rainier was visible in all its majesty, and the surrounding North Cascades as pretty as ever. We also saw quite a few mountain bikers on the trail up, most of whom were quite polite and supportive. I also noticed that I wasn't urinating, and while not defecating had been part of the plan, not urinating had not been. Fortunately, I was sweating, so I wasn't too worried about a krebs cycle shutdown. The "flat" trail to the last aid station was murder. The uneveness of it just made it awful for the knee and the feet. I thought Mark was going to sprint ahead of me, but he seemed happy with the pace I was setting, and no one caught us. After about an hour but what seemed like six, we made it to the last aid station, less than three miles from the finish. Sparky ushered us across the state highway again, and we had a little over two miles of relatively nice trail to the finish. I pulled ahead of Mark a bit, and it looked like my prediction that we would finish 3,4,and 5 was going to hold true. I passed a sign that said that the parking lot was a quarter mile ahead. And the next thing I knew, the trail ended at some outbuildings that were past the parking lot. LOST! I retraced my steps, found the missed turn, and finished in 5'th, a minute after Mark. He was very upset for having (inadvertently) pulled a fast one like that, but I figured it was what I deserved for pulling away from him at the end. Ray had finished 10 minutes ahead of us, Steve about 50 minutes before him, and John about 5 minutes before him (I think) (I know John won, I just don't know by how much). I remarked that I had had trouble with the last turn, but I was told that it really was well marked. I was somewhat gratified when no. 6 missed it too. More survey tape went up after that. My time was 8:28:04, which was slower than I had thought I would run but not bad considering the difficulty of the course. At least I think so, it was, after all, my first 50. I spent the next 3 1/2 hours icing my knee, taking a shower, eating spaghetti and corn, and above all, congratulating the other runners as they finished. When one runner commented on how welcome the baked potatoes at the aid stations were, I put in a plug for the marathon in Boise, the Great Potato. The prizes in that are 10# bags of potatoes. The prizes in this were birdhouses that Mark made. In my bio, I answered the question "why do you run ultras" with "I don't know". I wasn't trying to be sublime, I really don't know. Low blood sugar isn't a reason, I'll tell you that. But the good cheer that permeated this race, among the volunteers and the other runners, was really rather remarkable. I guess I don't have to tell people on this list about that, but when people talk about endorphins and runner's high, I'll always remember that there is a much more powerful, and even more visceral, good feeling associated with ultrarunning. If any WR50 runners or volunteers are reading this, thank you all very much. Really. Notwithstanding my scenic detour at the end, as far as I could tell, the WR50 was very well run and organized. It was certainly a pretty course, and I expect that the race will continue to grow.