Colchester Half Marathon

Driving to the Colchester Half Marathon this morning I was joyful, almost tearful, at the prospect of racing again. I haven't raced since last summer when I hurt my foot/ankle running the VT 100. I almost didn't run this one because it snowed and sleeted off and on all night. But the race didn't start until 10 and by the time I had to leave all was fast and clear.

I love the Colchester Half Marathon. I used to run it back in my road running/triathlon days. Back then the entry fee was $2 and maybe 50 people used to show up. I guess folks were a lot less hardy back in the 90's. When I pulled into the parking lot at the high school 15 minutes before start time there were only a couple of spaces left. Weird. This race has gotten bigger. (And the entry fee has gone up to $12!) I think there were something like 200 or 250 starters. Which is great because the race director is wonderful and deserves every runner he gets. The course is lovely and quite hilly. It goes up and down through farm country on some lovely dirt roads. It was in places reminiscent of Vermont.

Despite all of the runners milling around in the school lobby I was surprised to not recognize a living soul. Have I been out of the game that long? I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole......all the names and faces had very suddenly changed.

Just before the start, bringing up the rear of the herd heading for the line out on the street, I found my people. There were the ultrarunners, Bogie and Nipmuck Dave, unconcerned about getting a good place in the pack, unconcerned, really, about starting with the pack at all. And then to my thrilled surprise I heard my name, turned around and there was Grace, my dear friend with whom I have not run nor talked in a couple of months. Hooray!

Grace and I started out together and ended up running the whole race side by side. Grace is faster than I am, but she hasn't been running as much over the winter and wanted to keep it fun. We had a marvelous time gabbing our heads off, keeping the pace challenging but not overly so. We both wanted to get our heart rates up, churn up the legs a little, but not so much that we finished in a heap like a couple of Olympic cross country skiers.

The first ten miles clipped by in a dream. I could not believe how quickly those first ten miles flew past us. I guess when you're used to running for hours and hours on Saturday mornings, a little ten-miler fails to register all that much. Mile 11 was a bit more challenging. It was mostly uphill (or at least I remember it as uphill) on ice. But I think we still banged out a low-8 minute mile.

Mile 12 got a bit tougher. We were back out on the paved roads, a long strait stretch, rolling, with little to break the monotony of the long line of runners stretched out in front of us. At this point putting one foot in front of the other was mostly a mental exercise. I struggled to keep my head in the game. I don't think I ate enough before the race or in the days leading up to it and I was starting to bonk.

The last mile was tough. The wheels fell off. I heaved myself up the last hill with tunnel vision and burning legs. I thought a lot about those Olympic skiers during that last mile. I couldn't talk anymore. I felt like I was slowing Grace down and told her to go ahead, but she was having none of it. "I haven't seen you in months," she said. "I'm staying with you."

Thank you, Grace. You got me up that last hill.

Our finish time was somewhere around 1:50. I don't know the exact time and cannot find the results anywhere yet. Doesn't matter. We got what we wanted: a fun run with a little extra effort at the end. It felt great to get the legs churning and burning. First time in a long time.

I was wiped out for the rest of the day. The kids and I watched the Olympics, played a few games, read some books. At 5 o'clock I went out for a slow 5-miler with Eddie to work all the nasty stuff out of my legs. That little run felt surprisingly good. And the late winter light at dusk was beautiful. I was reminded of the difficult days after our 3rd child was born 5 years ago. I was a post partum disaster, not eating, not sleeping and having one panic attack after the next. It was nightmarish. I remember dusk being the absolute worst time of the day. Night was coming and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The horrible feeling of dread would take over my head. It was scary. So as I was running I was conscious of being very thankful: thankful for my life now, and thankful for having survived that difficult year.

I highly recommend a little warm down the evening after a shorter race. It made a tremendous difference.

A note about shoes: I ran the race in my oldest, most worn out, least cushioned pair of trail shoes (Salomon XA Pro) and my foot and ankle held up beautifully. As I wrote in my last post my ankle often bothers me in road shoes (Saucony Progrid Triumph and Adidas Supernova) on the road, but not in trail shoes on the trail. Nor does it hurt in trail shoes on the road, though this is a bit uncomfortable. The trail shoes were actually perfect for the icy portions of dirt road on the Colchester course.

I am going to post a question on the Ultra list about this shoe issue. I always get great advice from the folks there. I'll let you know what I find out.

Up and Up at Pittsfield Peaks

Damn, I wish I had my camera. This was such a lovely race.

Actually, I did have my camera. I packed it and brought it up to VT. But when I went to take a picture of Brian working on some esoteric physics project in our tent the night before the race, the lens would not open. Someone broke my camera!

I'm not naming any names here, but I have my suspicions.


A whole bunch of pictures stored in the camera look vaguely like this......

I think the finger points on one direction. I can't prove anything. I'm just saying....

Anyway. In the days leading up to the race, reading thorough some of the finish times from last year's Pittsfield Peaks race, I was a bit nervous (read: terrified). And our scenic driving route up to the race, cutting through the middle of Vermont, did nothing to quell my fears. The big hills rolled on and on in an unrelenting undulation of steep, dark greenery. Yikes!

Brian and I arrived at the general store in Pittsfield to get our numbers and shirts just before nightfall. I was too stunned by the drive to say much to anyone. I chatted briefly with Nate (we always recognize each other: I was the helpful volunteer at Lake Waramaug a couple of years ago who duck taped Nate's earbud into his ear), then Brian and I went off to set up our tent in the small tent city perched on top of the septic system of Amee Farm (picture a lush hillock with a pipe sticking out the top dotted with tents). Ahh, ultra runners.....

A few babies cried in the night, but I am well past my days of lactation so I slept pretty well.

The race began precisely at 6. Race director Andy Weinberg told us to go, and like lemmings to the slaughter, off we went.

Brian did get this one picture of the start with our good Cannon just before the battery died. I am not actually in the picture because I started way in the back, but Nikki Kimball (eventual women's winner) is, and that's even better.

The course went immediately uphill and did not let up all day. I didn't even try to run that first mile. No sense in it. There was WAY more climbing to come. This course goes up a total of 14,670 feet. That is the same elevation gain for the whole of the VT 100 concertina-d down into 53 long miles. Woo, boy!

I settled in with a bunch of sweet guys for the first 20 miles or so. There was Donny from western NY and Chip the cardiologist from Brooklyn (I stayed with him rather deliberately!). And I very much enjoyed sharing the trail with the father/son team, Rik and Josh Robert. Rik regaled me with tales from his life as an EMT in Northern Vermont and his son egged him on. They were a delightful pair. I do hope that my kids and I will be such friends when everybody grows up. Talking with Rik gave me a chance to bring up one of my favorite books, Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup. It's a wonderful book about a Unitarian chaplain assigned to work search and rescue with the Main Game Wardens.

The course to this point had been unrelentingly up and down. After Mile 18 there was a horrendous half-mile climb up a wicked steep hill and then back down again. I saw Nate and Sherpa John barreling down as I was starting up. That was the last time I saw either of them. The woman working the aid station at the bottom of the hill loved my running skirt. She said that in her three years of working this race she had never seen a running skirt. Evidently I am on the cutting edge of fashion in this one very specific, very small sub-culture of women. (There were 8 of us who finished the race this year).

After another big climb and descent we circled back to our drop bags and started out into the Blood Root section of the course.

I had been hearing about this section all morning. All the talk was of huge, exposed climbs and bears. Sherpa John had marked this section and let everyone know that the bear scat and the mud were abundant. I ran a bit with a guy named Joe, one of the founders of the race. He is a bit of an endurance freak, having biked across the country and run 300 miles in one shot last year. He told me that if I finished this race, woke up Sunday morning feeling fine and then popped off a 20 then I'd be ready for a 300.

(Flash forward 24 hours: I am lumbering down the stairs on all fours, and every time I sit down it feels like a permanent condition. Bang out 20? Yuh, right!?)

All this time my stomach was feeling great. I was carrying Rolaids and every time I felt a twinge of nausea I'd pop a couple. I ate a Clif Blok and 2 peanut butter crackers every hour and alternately sipped water from my Wink pack and Nuun from my bottle. All was well in Digest-o-ville.

I left Joe behind when he stopped to soak in the stream and started up Bloodroot Mountain all on my own. Yes, I saw bear scat. Yes, I was utterly freaked out and alone. Yes, I was tormented by black flies (or something) and stinging nettles. Oh, the joy of it all! I think I climbed for two hours. Up and up and up. The downhill was not much of a relief. It was steep and boggy and overgrown. Every time I got a good trot going, I would hit a lengthy patch of ankle- and sometimes knee-deep mud. Time went by, but I barely noticed it. I was in the zone, baby!

I circled back to my drop bag at Mile 37 and tried really hard to remember everything. By this time in the race my brain was practically useless. It took me a ridiculously long time to get my flashlight, more Rolaids, crackers, iPod and jacket into my pack. It was here that I got the news: Vikki Kimball had finished in just over 9 hours. Ihad to sit down when I heard that, because here I was with 15 miles to go, 10.5 hours into the race. The friendly volunteers were beginning to accuse me of stalling. Eventually I grabbed a few sips of juicy Coca Cola and started on my way.

A mile or so down the road (this little section was on dirt road) I decided to give my iPod a try. I popped in a Julia Sweeny monologue. Again, this took way, WAY longer than it should have. My fingers would not work properly and I could not get the ear buds to stay in my ears (hello, Nate?). In my difficulty, I may or may not have missed a small piece of the course. Fifteen or so minutes later I caught up to another woman and she mentioned a loop through the woods. WHAT? I had been on road this whole time. I turned around and ran back for 10 minutes, trying to figure it out. I saw another guy running down the road who told me there was no loop through the woods. Weird. So I turned around again, losing maybe 20 minutes in the process.

After this brief bit of relatively flat road running (NIRVANA ITSELF), the course turned up again and into the woods. Up and down and up and down. And then it hit a maze. Switchbacks and trail crossings and more switchbacks until my poor head was a-swimmin. And my poor belly gave out. The Rolaids no longer spelled relief. I was sick.

And on top of it all, I was obsessed that I was going to be disqualified for missing some small, possibly imaginery, section of the course. All of this work for nothing! It took me 10 miles to come up with this brilliant plan: I would get to the finish line, not cross, tell Andy that I think I owed him 5 or 10 more minutes of running, turn around, run 5 or 10 minutes, then finish. I AM A GENIUS!

About this time, I saw Donny again, a guy I ran with at the start of the race. I (rather desperately) asked him if he had run through a wooded section after the last aid station. Donny is such a nice man. He took the time to listen to my delerious ravings, told me very gently that he did not remember if he ran through the woods or not, and let me know that he thought my plan was unnecessary. Just finish, he said. Nobody cares about 5 minutes. And then he left me in the dust.

Nobody cares? This was a novel thought.

And then I hit the last two hills and forgot all about my troubles. The penultimate hill was bad. Steep. I almost threw up. And I thought it was the last one.

And then I rounded a corner and came face to face with the last hill. Reader, I wanted to cry. It wsa the steepest thing I have ever seen. And it went on and on. Trudge, trudge, stop. Trudge, trudge, stop. Half way up I put my hands on my knees and looked up. "You have to get up there," I told myself, "You have to!"

Man, it was like the last stages of giving birth. You have been in labor all day. You have been pushing. You are exhausted. And there is absolutely no turning back. It hurst like hell, but you have to get that baby out. You have to!

That's all I could think about as I went up that last hill.

As I crested the hill and started down, there was Brian coming up to find me! What a sight for sore eyes he was. A little less than a mile, he told me. He could not believe I was still running. He had done the 10-mile course earlier in the day and he barely made it up the hill I had just climbed. Turns out Brian had quite a few adventures while I was running. He rescued a baby bird, he found some guy's car keys in the grass after an extensive search, and he won the men's division of the 10 mile race (a woman beat him!).

Brian ran that last mile with me in his crocs. I gave him my addled pitch about running an extra 10 minutes when I got to the finish line (which, by the way, sounded impossible to me now). He echoed Donny's sentiments. "At this stage of the game, nobody's gonna care."

I got to the finish line and started yelling, "Andy! Andy! I think I have to run another five, ten minutes. I think I missed a small section in the woods after Upper Michegan Road!"

He handed me my finisher's award (an awesome spike!), grabbed me by the arm, looked me in my two crazed eyes and said quite firmly, "No. You didn't."

Ah, relief. I didn't. Nobody cares.

"What did you think of that course, huh?" he asked me.

And this sweet little mother of three looked up at him and said, "Andy, that was a FUCKED UP COURSE!"

He could not have been more pleased.

The results arrived in my email this morning. 13:39. I finished toward the late-middle of the pack. I was fifth of eight women, first over 40 (by over an hour, so my possible 5, 10-minute lapse did not matter).

What a great race. Highly recommended. I'll be back next year.

Stone Cat 50

Last Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of my ultrarunning career (if , as I do, you only count races of 50 miles and up). What better way to celebrate than run the race that started it all: the Stone Cat 50 in Ipswich, MA.

This year's course was a different. It was still four 12.5 mile laps, but single track sections were added (hooray!), and I could be mistaken, but it seemed like the course looped backwards from last year's direction. Admittedly, I have no head for remembering terrain, but I recognized almost nothing from last year's course, save the in and out section at the beginning and end of each loop. (But then again, each loop seemed like a brand new course to me, so take whatever I say with a huge grain of salt.)

I liked the new course. The single track was twisty and fun. Kept my mind off running. Every time I came off the single track onto the wider carriage road my body felt heavy and clunky.

I must be getting used to running these long races, because the whole day went by in a weird time warp. Hours and hours drifted by without my quite noticing. At one point I looked down at my watch to see that I had been running for something like 5 or 6 hours, but I swear it felt like 15 minutes. It was a very enjoyable day.

I kept a conservative pace for the first three laps, because I was worried about my stomach. I ran with Penny, whom I found in the bathroom just before the pre-race meeting. We moved in and out of a big group of women for the first two laps. Oddly, most of the women had three kids at home. There was lots of parenting talk, Halloween stories, etc. I have to say, I wanted no part of that conversation. This was my parenting vacation.

The aid stations were wonderful. I recognized many of the same people working them from last year. I think many of the GAC runners work this race to satisfy their volunteer requirements for the VT 100. It's so great when the volunteers are ultrarunners themselves, because they know exactly how you are feeling and exactly what you need. Penny used to run with these guys before she got injured, so everyone at the aid stations knew her by name. I felt like I was running with the mayor of the race.

Just before heading out for the fourth and final lap, I changed my shoes and socks, which had been thoroughly soaked during my three traverses of the beaver dam section of the course. This gave me new life, and I fairly flew through the last lap (or at least it felt like I was flying -- I think I kept up a 12-minute mile, hee hee). I felt bad leaving Penny behind, but she had run a road marathon the weekend before and a 50K the weekend before that. I think her legs were done.

Miraculously, my stomach held up all day. As per the advice of Vespa Peter, I have continued to cut back on carbs in my daily diet and to eat minimally at all the aid stations during races. And Penny, who is a trainer and dietitian, gave me great advice as well: no fiber and minimal dairy for the last 2 days before the race.

I ate a little pasta with ground beef and mushrooms the night before the race and a sunflower bagel with jam a couple of hours before (while driving in the car listening to my book on tape). At the aid stations I had only a single piece of potato with salt or a couple of Saltine crackers. This was just enough (with the occasional addition of a Clif Block left to dissolve between my cheek and gum like those guys back in high school with the milk carton spittoons at the back of the class) to get me from aid station to aid station. The aid stations were roughly 4 miles apart.

After picking up the pace in the fourth lap, I kept waiting for the old queasiness to kick in. But it never did. At the last aid station I had a little chicken broth. It tasted like the best, most expensive meal you can imagine. After an entire day of nothing but potatoes and Saltines, the broth was like manna from heaven.

I once again passed on the Scotch at Fred's Cafe, though I must admit it was tempting.

By the end of the second lap I noticed that someone had tapped a keg in the woods and there were a few people milling around it. Mind you, this was maybe 11 in the morning. By the end of the third lap the crowd around the keg had grown and the unmistakable smell of sour beer, reminiscent of fraternity parties and office Christmas galas of old, wafted across the field. These people were clearly having too much fun.

I finished the race half an hour faster than last year, though I'm not sure how significant that is given the course changes. But I felt way, WAY better. Last year my father had to practically carry me to the car. This year I spent half an hour trotting up and down the road trying to figure out where I had parked the darn thing.

All in all, it has been a great year of running. Happy anniversary to me, and here's to another healthy, enjoyable year!

Bimblers Bluff 50K

Much of this post is lifted from a blog I wrote for my newspaper.

Sitting around our tent site last summer the tense and unreal evening before the Vermont 100, local Connecticut runner Kerry Arsenault dropped over to tell Chuck and Grace and me that her husband, Jerry Turk, was planning to direct a 50K (31-mile) race called Bimblers Bluff on October 26th right here in Southeastern Connecticut.

I took a flier and kept the race in the back of my mind during the intervening months, knowing that I was planning to run a 50-miler just two weeks later, but thrillingly tempted by the possibility of running an ultra just 45 minutes from home. The race was to be run entirely on trails in and around Guilford and Madison, CT.

About a month ago I bit the bullet and signed up. Having just run a pair of races in the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire I was feeling cocky. I thought to myself, “A 50K here in mountain-less, gently rolling shoreline Connecticut – piece of cake!”
Oh how wrong I was. I had failed to take into account just how narrow and rocky and rooty and twisty and oh, so difficult-to-find the trails in Guilford and Madison can be.


I talked my friend Susan into running with me, telling her that I was not planning to break any records, but merely to indulge in a long, leisurely training run in the woods. Had we known just how long we were going to be in the woods, I’m not sure we would have gone ahead. Ultimately I’m glad we did, and I had fabulous time. Susan, however, is terrified of getting lost and felt tortured for much of the run. She was a trooper (for the most part).

We arrived at a Guilford elementary school gym just in time for the pre-race meeting and joked with Stonington runner, Davnet, her husband, Paul, and our trail friend Nipmuck Dave about how slow we all were. We gathered for the start and took off comfortably in last place, where Susan and I stayed for most of the day.

I have never in my life gotten so lost on a course. It was confusing and poorly marked. We hadn’t run 2 miles when we got lost for the first time. We had run about half a mile off course before realizing that we hadn’t seen any of the pink ribbons that marked the course in quite a while. We backtracked with our new friend, Marv from Colorado, telling ourselves how lucky we were to have gotten lost so early in the race, and how we would all be much more careful to look for pink ribbons. We eventually found the trail, only to head off in the wrong direction, running half way back to the start before realizing that everything was looking a little too familiar.

Alas, it was to be a full day of losing the trail and searching for pink ribbons. But the weather was perfect – crystal blue and warm after a week of forecasted rain – and the forest was lovely with the yellow leaves backlit against the trees.




Our pace was excruciatingly slow. We were running at a snail’s pace to begin with, and all of the route finding and rock dodging slowed us to a near crawl. Suffice it to say that it took us almost 3 hours to get to the second aid station at Mile 10.

The aid stations in this race were outstanding. All of the volunteers were cheerful and encouraging, especially to the pour souls in last place. Each time we came to an aid station (there were 5 on the course) I would stagger in gasping, “We’re alive!”. The volunteers joked with us, filled out bottles, and tried to feed us. I was eating only one piece of salted potato at each station, trying to run on a minimum amount of food to keep my poor stomach from getting sick. This strategy worked. During all of the 9 hours we were out on the trail, I only felt sick for about 10 minutes near the end, having finally indulged in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup with 2 miles to go.

The climb up Bluff Head after Aid Station 2 was epic (at least by Southeastern CT standards). Once at the top we could see for miles into the lake and rolling hills below. The view was remarkably reminiscent of Vermont.




I was chomping at the bit by now to go faster. But this would have been dumb. I kept reminding myself that this was a training run. Stone Cat in 2 weeks! Stone Cat in 2 weeks! Susan's ankle brace was killing her and this, combined with lots of little climbs, was slowing us down to a walking pace for long stretches. Every inch of me wanted to go faster.

Around mile 20, I started to up the pace and Susan and I briefly parted ways. Half an hour later I got a call on my cell phone: Susan saying she had lost the trail and was hopelessly lost. I ran back as quickly as I could, maybe a mile, yelling SUSAN! into the woods over and over. She called me again to tell me she could hear me. She somehow followed my voice back to the trail.
I had meanwhile gotten a bit lost myself. In my crazed state of mind, I missed a critical turn and was now looping back, still on the course, but now in a section we had run hours ago. I backtracked, found the crossroads and thankfully got myself back on the green-dot trail I had left. I was now, however, several minutes behind Susan. She ran/walked slowly until I caught up and, hugely relieved to have found each other, we stayed together for the rest of the run.

She owed me her VERY LIFE! Though, on second thought, she wouldn't have been out there in the first place if I hadn't talked her into running with me.

The last 8 miles or so were a repeat (more or less) of the first 8, so we did not loose the trail nearly as often toward the end of the race. We found one guy at a road crossing wandering up and down looking for the way back into the woods and we ran with him for a while, figuring six eyes looking for pink were better than four.

A quarter mile from the finish we popped out onto another road, having missed a turn on the trail a few yards back. We spent about 10 desperate minutes asking neighbors and construction workers where the elementary school was. Finally a woman stepped out of her house and directed us back onto the trail.

The finish line was a glorious sight. Susan’s kids were there to cheer us on and seeing their smiling faces was absolutely delightful. We both received a cool Buff (kind of a headband-hat type thing) as a finisher’s award, as well as bags of bagels and cider (if you stay out long enough you get to take home the leftover aid station food!).

All in all, I probably ran between 35 and 37 miles. The course itself was long (32.5 miles) and I ran at least three extra miles off it. Even so, I had a great day in the woods. I loved the race and will definitely be back next year with the detailed course description (available on The Bimbler’s Sound Web Page) tucked into my pocket.

I have a year to convince Susan to join me. She says NO WAY.

Vermont 50

I woke up Saturday morning all stressed out. The weekend weather report was dismal: wind and rain, thunder and lightning. The idea of getting up in the middle of the night to drive to Vermont and run 50 miles on Sunday was becoming less and less appealing.

I was ready to ditch the whole thing when I logged on to the race website to check the list of entrants. And what to my wondering eyes did I see? My friend Penny had upgraded herself from the 50K to the 50-miler. Penny was running! I would have someone to run with!

My friends, things began looking up.

Saturday evening I set two alarms for 2 a.m. and proceeded to sleep not a wink as I watched the hours tick by. I got up at two, just before the alarm, quietly dressed, made my tea and slipped out of my sleeping house.

It rained all the way up. Three hours and twenty minutes of rain. I listened to a collection of humor pieces from the New Yorker called Fierce Pajamas on CD, which proved to be excellent company. All the great writers from the last century humored me along, and before I knew it I was in Vermont. AND IT STOPPED RAINING!

I found Penny in line at the Porta-Potties and stayed with her for the rest of the long day. We were thrilled to have found each other.

650 mountain bikers went off in front of the runners. They went in stages based on age and ability. By the time our race started at 6:40, the sky was light and fog was starting to lift.


Not such a great picture (I took it while running), but you get the idea.

As usual, I don't remember much about the first 20 miles. Penny and I ran together, talking our heads off. We moved in and out of other runners' orbits, but didn't stick with anyone for very long. The weather was perfect, strangely enough: cool-ish with an occasional mist from above. The leaves were just starting to turn (unlike here in Southeastern CT where everything is still green).


We ran on dirt roads and nice wide trails. There were no technical bits. The running was smooth and lovely. We walked the uphills for the first half of the race to save our legs. Penny is a phenomenal uphill walker. She told me that Jeff Washburn (of GAC fame) once told her to always "walk with a purpose." Indeed she does.

Here I am around mile 12, still looking fairly energetic. I actually felt mostly good all the way to mile 40.


Right around mile 20 (if I remember correctly) we started to go up. Up and up and up. I love uphill running. All those years of pushing heavy strollers have beefed my uphill muscles. Give me up-hill over down-hill any day.

We ran by horse farms.


And made friends with the horses.


Right near the midpoint of the race we came upon the World's Best Aid Station at Smoke Rise Farm. Jimmy Buffett was singing Brown Eyed Girl and the food spread was phenomenal. Check out the homemade WHOOPIE PIES!!! Absolutely divine.



The farm itself was to die for.


If you like the idea of living on a Vermont hillside, it looks like the neighbors are moving.


Coming (reluctantly) out of Smoke Rise, we continued up and up. We should have been at the top of a freaking Alp by now, we had been running up for so long.

We finally said goodbye to the road and headed back down on the trails.


I'm not sure how long we ran on this lovely trail. We moved through a couple more aid stations, feeling progressively less peppy. Around mile 35 my stomach started to go south (it's like clockwork) and Penny's hamstring started giving her trouble. We took turns jollying each other along. Luckily, when one of us was feeling poorly the other was feeling pretty good.

Somewhere along the way, the trail turned labyrinthine. It twisted and turned along a narrow path. The trees seemed to be closing in on us. With all of the switch-backs and circle-backs, it felt like we weren't making any forward progress. Just when I thought I would go zipping out of my mind, the trail would twist down, tantalizingly close to a road, only to wind up again into the gruesome trees.

Between mile 40 and 45 I was really quite sick. Penny pulled me through this stretch, and we made it to the last aid station with 4.6 miles to go. I couldn't eat anything at the aid station, but did choke down a couple of Cliff Blocks and a cup of Coke to carry me through to the end.

We walked out of the aid station and then started a little shuffle, telling ourselves that we were keeping up a good pace and making great time. (We were barely moving forward, mind you.) We could hear the finish line as we headed onto the cross-country ski trails at Mt. Ascutney.


Just as we came upon the darkest, muddiest, most treacherous stretch of trail, the skies opened up. It could not have been raining harder. I was wearing my road shoes rather than my trail shoes, and I could not get any traction in the mud, which had been chewed up by the 650 mountain bikers. (How mtn bikers got through this stretch, I will never understand). At one point, as I slipped and slid through the snot-like murk (think of your three-year-old's first sneeze of the morning right in the heart of flu season) on a narrow trail high above a deep ravine, I started to seriously worry for my safety. I would not have been the least surprised to have been accosted by a Rodent of Unusual Size. I despaired that I would never, never, never make it to the finish line. Those last miles took us an hour and a half.

And then we came out, still in the rain, to the grassy hill above Mt. Ascutney and the finish line.


What a welcome sight it was. We ran down the hill together laughing and linked pinkies at the finish line. 11 hours, 2 minutes (or something like that).

I immediately got in the car and drove home. The rain came down in buckets the entire trip. I listened to Tom Perrotta's new book, The Abstinence Teacher, and, what with my head all full of endorphins, did not even notice the passage of time.

Thanks to all of the race officials and volunteers who made this such a great race. In the end, it really was a wonderful gift of a day.

Pisgh Mountain 50K

It could not have been raining harder when Brian and I woke up at 4:30 Sunday morning to get ready to head up to the Pisgah Mountain Trail Race. The rain was beating the windows and flooding the gutters while I made coffe and toasted a corn muffin. Big raindrops flew by the porch light as I changed into my running clothes and gathered my bottles and Gu's. I had to put on my raincoat for the first time since June just to haul all of my stuff out to the car.

The kids were spending the night at Grandma and Grandpa's so the house was weirdly quiet as Brian and I made our frantic last minute preparations (where was the Vasoline? where was Brian's wallet?) and departed for the race.

Driving on Rte. 95 I hit a big puddle and hydroplaned just as another car was passing me on the left. I clutched the steering wheel for dear life as the car skidded over the water in the dark. And then I slowed down. If we missed the start, so be it. I wasn't going to orphan my babies just to get to the race on time.

Half an hour into the trip we stopped to pick up Grace and Steve, who were also running. Grace was using the race as a long training run for the NYC Marathon and Steve was hoping simply to finish without completely blowing out his knee.

We arrived at the start with 20 minutes to spare and made quick work of getting our numbers and our complimentary loaf of Vermont bread. For the moment, the rain had eased up, though the sky was still ominously dark.

Grace is a much faster runner than I am, and Steve is even faster than Grace, but the three of us started together and planned to stay together all day.

Grace and me at the start.


We positioned ourselves at the back of the pack and shuffled up the road when the gun went off. Brian, who was running the 23K, was further up and we never saw him again.

The first two miles follow a long uphill on a hard-packed dirt road. We ran this very slowly to save our legs for the rest of the day. Once on the trail, the route for the 23K quickly splits off to the right (a tempting diversion!), while the 50Kers continue to the left. Grace and I ditched our long sleeved shirts at the trailhead. A woman standing there said she would bring them back to the finish line for us (which she did -- thank you!).

The first trail miles were wet but lovely, mostly on an old, wide carriage road with a few rolling ups and downs and one major climb. We walked the ups and ran the downs. The woods were drippy and foggy with an eerie darkness everywhere. It reminded me of early spring in Portland, OR and my long ago runs in Forest Park.


Coming into the first aid station, Steve decided to drop. His knee was hurting. The Chopat strap he had hunted down the night before the race was doing nothing for him, and he feared permanent damage.

So we said goodbye to Steve at the aid station in the rain.


But we hadn't seen the end of him. He reappeared like Lazarus of the Trail about 20 minutes later. Evidently the people at the aid station had no idea how to get him back to the start. They told him that the next aid station was much closer to the start/finish and he could walk out from there. So we had the pleasure of Steve's company for a few more miles.

I started to go a bit too fast over the next stretch of trail. I was out in front with Grace and Steve behind me. Those two are much faster than me, so I felt obligated to keep up a stiff pace. We marched quickly up the uphills and flew down the downhills. Barrelling down was fun, but I worried for my quads later in the race.

I fell going uphill (not downhill, thank my lucky stars) and almost wrecked my knee on a pointy rock. That slowed me down. Grace said I was going too fast. Point taken.

We came zooming down to the next aid station (roughly mile 10) and said goodbye once again to Steve. I looked at my watch and was shocked, SHOCKED to find that we had been running for almost 2 1/2 hours. It had taken us 2 1/2 hours to go 10 miles. Dodging the muddly puddles had taken a huge chunk of time out of our run.

Giddy-up.

We walked the long, steep hill up from the aid station. I was breathing hard, my heart was racing, and my stomach felt ready to let go. This was going to be a long, long day.

I tried to drink while walking and I took a couple of S caps to settle my stomach. By the top of the hill I was feeling a bit better. That climb, it turned out, was the low point of my race. Luckily, I never felt that bad again.

I don't remember much about the next section. Grace and I chatted away about everything under the sun. We didn't see another soul all the way to the next aid station about four miles later.

Just after aid station 3, we came upon a beaver dam.


Which made the trail all around it look like this.


After wading through this Big Muddy, we no longer made any attempt to keep our feet dry. The jig was up. Soggy, heavy shoes for the rest of the day.

The next section of trail was a roller coaster of steep ups and downs through a lovely stand of pines. I felt like Little Gretel wandering around looking for the witch's gingerbread house in the fog. It was surreal.



We started running the uphills here rather than walking. We were more than half way done now and our legs still felt good, so what the hell. We shuffled up at a pace slightly faster than walking. I hate walking uphill. The shuffle is faster and less of a drain on the hip flexors. We passed six or eight people in the hills, the most people we had seen all day. Everyone was taking about the mud and the puddles. We just nodded politely, said hello, and shuffled on.

It was a relief to come into the next aid station, because we knew we only had 10 miles left. 10 miles is nothing. We would definitely finish.

About a half mile into the 5-mile Kilburn loop I heard, "Hey, Pam!" It was my old friend, Penny. She and I had run Pisgah together last year and had a fabulous time gabbing away the hours. She was rehabbing then from a serious hamstring injury. We stayed in intermittent email touch, but the last time I saw her in person she could barely walk. I was volunteering at the Lake Waramaug Ultras and Penny stopped by to say that she wouldn't be running because her plantar fascia has just popped (pause for stomach dropping groan).

I never thought I see her on a race course again.

But here she was, toodling along at a decent pace on the Kilburn Loop. She told Grace and me that back in the spring she had been at mile three of a ten mile trail race when she felt (and heard!) her plantar facia pop away from the bones of her foot. She kept running another six miles until she couldn't take another step and had to be carried to the finish. She was told she would never run again.

Evidently she persevered until she found a surgeon willing to let her run. He completely detatched the fascia and now she runs with lots of tape and an orthotic insert.

The grim details of that story got us all the way back around to the aid station and down to the last five miles. Grace and I said goodbye to Penny and picked up the pace (or so we thought) to the finish line.

The last miles were nothing but a long slog through slippy, slidey, deep-seated mud. The trail had been torn up by an excavator putting in a new snow mobile trail and all of the rain had turned it to soup. It took us a full hour to run (and we did run every step of the way) three miles through this slop.

The final mile was back on the road, and we toughed it out to the finish, where our now clean and well fed husbands awaited us. Brian had a great race, finishing 18th in the 23K in 2 hours, 18 minutes. He would be a fantastic trail runner if only he would train a bit more. Alas.

Here we are at the finish, in a time of roughly 6 hours and 42 minutes, muddy to our knees and thrilled to be out of the soup.


And just a few minutes behind us was Penny, the miraculous, facia-less wonder girl!



I had been hoping to beat my time from last year, but with all of water and mud on the trail I was 20 minutes slower. One of the guys at the last aid station told us that the winning time this year was also 20 minutes slower than last year. So I don't feel too badly.

All in all it was a wonderful race. Beautiful trail and dramatic weather and good friends to share it all with. It doesn't get much better.