Susan Donnelly

No, I haven’t totally gone to the Dark Side.  There were good reasons to run another timed race:

• I love the name of the race
• The race means a lot to Rob and I wanted to bring all his stories to life
• It helps me achieve another upcoming ultra goal
• And the defining factor – Rob signed me up without giving me the chance to say NO

Over time, Rob’s stories had created a picture of the race in my imagination.  Like all such pictures, I didn’t expect this to be 100% true to life and because I’m a newbie at timed races (a refreshing place to be after 98 ultras) where the procedures and strategy are like a foreign language, I figured it would be even further from reality than usual, but I wasn’t even close to prepared for the hugeness of it all.

Driving to the race through the early Indiana light, the sky felt huge.  I spend most of my time in mountains and tall woods but the rural land here is flat fields peppered with short trees.  It spreads out evenly in all directions, as far as the eye can see, squashed flat beneath the sky.   Nowhere to hide and nothing to distract.  Just you and all that open sky.

Several turns into the quiet park, we rounded a corner and there it was.  A virtual sea of cars and brightly-colored tents, and people walking everywhere between them.  A red barn rose in the background and some neatly-painted white historic houses sat along one side of the field.  A huge car/tractor show was starting up in the adjacent field and it almost wasn’t clear where one event started and the other stopped.  There was so much color and activity that I couldn’t even spot the starting line.

This clearly wasn’t last weekend’s cozy Hot to Trot with the local ultra family.  This was a huge deal with tons of people.  And Rob won this?  Wow.

Meet Your Counter

With people milling around all over the place and the RD on the bullhorn, we found friends Wesley, Sharon and Wesley’s sister Annette, and went to check in.  It was already humid and the weather report was predicting near-record heat.  Ah well, we’re used to it in the South.  Grin and bear it and do what you want to do anyway.  Rob told me I was in the master’s female division and to go meet my lap counter.  Meet my counter?

It had never occurred to me that laps could be miscounted or go unnoticed.  They were huge to me.  Why would anyone fail to notice them?  John was a very nice, calm, dependable-looking person – exactly the sort you’d want banking your precious, hard-won laps.  He had a poster-sized sheet in front of him with what must have been all the master’s women’s names on the side all arranged in a grid.  I memorized his yellow shirt and where he was sitting in the row of maybe 10 or 12 lap counters lined up along the end of the course.  Then before I knew it, Marc the RD said “go” and we started.

The Lap

Each lap is a 3.29-mile loop.  It starts out on a wide dirt path, runs immediately past the car and tractor show, then past a small pond to turn right at an old cemetery onto a tree-lined, gradually uphill dirt road that is so depressingly straight you can see what seems like miles ahead, but at least it’s one of the two shady spots on the lap.  Not far along the road is Scott Hathaway’s memorial sign, which runners slowly draped with a garden of Hawaiian leis and flowers as the laps went by.

At the far end of the long dirt road, the lap emerges from the trees and and bears across open grass to cross one of the park roads.  From there, it bears right down a short stretch of rough road (ignore the “1 mile” sign painted on the pavement here – you don’t want to think about it).  It quickly bears left again past another pond, then curves just as quickly right arund the mown edge of open meadow next to (but not under – this is important!) a small wood of trees.

There’s a short section of pavement, enough to make you at least look speedy, on the way into the half-lap aid station.  The station itself is cranking out loud music and brimming with attentive volunteers.  To avoid a mutiny of the volunteers, the captain moved the heavy aid station tables into the shade shortly after the start.

The lap leaves the aid station on more open dirt road, past yet another larger pond, then around some S-curves in the baking sun (ignore the 2-mile sign here also, same reason as the other) that looks (and later on felt) like an African savannah.

The dirt road dead ends at pavement that signals our walk up a real hill, one of the few times in a race I’ve been truly thankful to see pavement.  On the first lap there was a drop or two of shade at the bottom but after that, there was no escape here from the sun.

The pavement tops outs, continues straight, turns left then dives right again into the only other reliable bit of tree-lined shade (watch your feet on those roots!) and emerges back into the open sun shortly afterwards, at the far end of the start/finish field.

And here’s the cool part – you run an absolute straight line from this end of the field to the other side along a wide, grassy track that cuts straight through that sea of tents, cars, and impromptu aid stations we saw at the beginning. It feels like the ultra version of the Oscar’s red carpet.

Another Lap, and Another, and Another…

First lap almost done.  As we ran down the corridor towards the lap counter tents at the far end, Rob told me to make eye contact with John every lap.  I did, though he’d already seen me coming, and he marked the poster in front of him as we ran by to start another lap.

It was so humid that first lap that I was already soaked.  As we counted off more laps, the day heated up and more runners started walking.  I needed to keep running as much as possible, even though Rob said it was ok to walk, because once I started walking something, I’d never go back to running it.  It was the slippery slope to walking an entire lap.

I also decided not to count the laps.  I just kept running.

The heat began to take a toll earlier than expected, even for a southern girl.  The wind was the only thing that saved us early on but after the fourth or fifth lap, the temperature suddenly jumped and the wind just blew hot air around.  It felt like getting into an un-air-conditioned car sitting in a parking lot in the middle of summer and turning on the fan.  The air was hard to breathe and the heat felt a bit claustrophobic.  There was so little shade on the course that we just baked.  I’d been drinking almost two full bottles every lap and could only assume from the lack of pit stops that I was sweating it all out.  I slowly emptied my bag of hot weather coping tricks and kept going.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Rob finally told me we’d reached our 50k goal (10 laps…amazing) and couldn’t fit another full lap into the time remaining, and this is where things got ingeniously bizarre.  We waited around and when there wasn’t enough time left for anyone to start a full lap, the RD announced it was time for the out-and-backs.

The concept here is simple and admirably creative.  Everyone who wants to, uses the remaining clock time to run as many quarter mile out-and-backs as they can to cram that last extra bit of mileage into the 8 hours.  A surprising number of people were game.  We all crowded onto the starting line and at the signal, we were off again!

The best way to describe it is like the opening of the doors at Walmart the day before Christmas when they’ve announced they’re giving away the hottest toy of the year – FREE, yes FREE – to the first 10 people to reach the toy department.  Well, that and the running of the bulls in Pamplona.  Bodies were everywhere, faces filled with grim determination and outright desperation.  Our strategy was to walk it as a cool down but like a little old man driving 30 mph on the interstate, we were dangerous traffic hazards.  We made it out and had the finish in sight when Rob said “get your straw!”

What???

Someone was holding out drinking straws and as you finished an out-and-back, and you grabbed a straw as proof.  Drinking straws suddenly held new meaning.  Runners furtively counted everyone else’s handfuls.  I began to fantasize about accumulating straws.  How many could you accumulate in the time left?  A box’s worth?

Just when I’d imagined two fistfuls of straws were actually an achieveable and worthy goal, the siren sounded and the race was over.  I took my three sad straws over to John. He totaled up the X’s on my grid line of his poster, added my straws, and pronounced that I’d run somewhere near 34 miles.

Eight hours to run 34 miles on flat ground?  I run rocky 50ks hours faster than that.  Either I was horribly out of shape, or all those aid station stops really added up, or I had a lot to learn about milking mileage out of 8 hours’ worth of laps.  I fervently hoped it wasn’t Option 1.

We Get Awards

Sweaty and sun-burnt, Rob and I attended the awards ceremony with what looked like everyone else in the entire race.  That’s the sign of a good race – people stay.

They gave Rob a special award for the person who has probably run the most miles on the course.  It’s hard to get Rob to say anything to a group, much less through a microphone, but he said what I’ve often heard him say, “If I had only one more race to run, it would be this.”

As he says, they treat him like a king, but then, they do that for everyone.  They have an entire walking division in the race, the volunteers keep an extremely close eye on your needs, everyone gets an medal, almost everyone from what I could see gets an award, and there’s a real party afterwards.  It’s obvious why the race is so huge.

I’d brave the Dark Side to do it again next year!

Thinking About it Afterwards

The race was fun.  The change of scenery truly refreshing.  The heat, a dose of real summer after our cool one here in Tennessee.  So why did this post take a week to write?

Some nagging something has kept me pondering for days.  About 5 laps into the race, I was concentrating hard on my form to make the running as easy as and fluid as I could, even as everything was tightening up and the heat was peaking.  I had stopped conversing.  Rob and I have run plenty of miles like this in companionable silence.  Still, that day Rob chatted, laughed and joked through the heat like everything was great.  Kept tabs on how much I was drinking. Lied to me often about how well I was doing.  And on the last few laps, I had the strange sense that Rob was almost floating along beside to me.

It took me all week to figure that something out – Rob was actually helping me complete my 50k exactly like I’ve witnessed him help so many other people in so many other races.  I laughed out loud when it hit me.

Turns out, he probably was floating along beside me.  We’ve run plenty of trail races and runs together where I do well or we run at least as equals but he won this flat, fast race in 2000 with 53.86 miles.  That’s 20 more than me in the same amount of time.  20!  He’s also won three national championships.  He may finish in the back of the pack, for reasons of his own, but he’s flat-out good.

So as good as the race was the most important thing I took away from the day was a present from Rob – the reinforcement of my belief in the Charles Schulz philosophy that the people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards.  They simply are the ones who care the most.

Posted: Sunday, August 16, 2009, 9:21 pm | Tags: Blog | Respond | Trackback