This past weekend I ran a 52 mile race. This is ultramarathon #7 for me, and I'm pretty content that I don't need to embark on another one. I like mixing it up and these have their own kind of mental challenge, and next on the agenda is lowering the golf handicap and learning how to surf.

About 7 years ago I did a handful of 50 plus mile races, and at the time I was doing around 75 or 100 miles per week in training runs. When you train that much, the pain lessens on the longer runs, but they are still really tough. This time I have been in good shape, but only doing about 30 miles a week in training. So this particular race last weekend was more of a mental challenge than a physical one.

What goes through your head on these long runs? For me, I was going fast and felt strong on the first 20 miles. I pushed hard and fried my legs. So mile 20 to 37 was rough all the way around. Somewhere along the way I got the right mixture of enough water and painkillers (ibuprofen and aleve, nothing fancy, just a lot of it) and felt really strong again from mile 37 to 45.

Around the 20 mile I thought about throwing in the towel and catching a cab. Well not really a cab the bus that takes you to the start line. I've never DNF'd on any of the ultras I've done, do not finished, which happens. Either you snap mentally or you wipe out or some chronic injury convinces you that it's serious enough that you should stop. But I thought, I've done these before, do I really need number 7? You can always make excuses as to why you shouldn't finish. I've had one startup that I DNF'd on, but never a run, so after a fleeting fantasy of a perfect afternoon run, I hiked up my LIVESTRONG shorts, turned up Delerium on my iPod and jammed onwards up a big ass hill.

Of course, I knew I'd keep going. But it's good to be able to explore your weak spot and make sure that the strong spot is strong enough to beat it into submission.

Towards the end my trusty Nike + Ipod told me I was done, 50 miles. When you run, you do a lot of mental computation to convince yourself you are making progress even when you are miserable. On this race I "pretended" I was running a 100 mile race, to try to fool the mind into making the race easier. So at mile 25, I was 25% done, not 50% done. At about mile 40 I gave up on this and just desperately wanted to finish.

It was cold all day. I just had on one of those thin blue Nike coolmax shirts. I thought it would be warm, but most of the race was in the shade and on the other side of the mountain. Cold for 5 miles is five but after 50 you're pretty mad about the situation. The other runners except for a few were smarter than me, with furry arm things and long sleeve shirts. I'm a newb and it's been awhile, so I could have planned better. I remember thinking even though I was miserable, of how challenging the 100 mile race is because you have to run all day and all night - so you go through sun down, it's night, it's cold, and your bobbing down the trail with a little headlamp. Night seems to last forever, like a bad dream, and when the sun finally comes up you wipe some tears off your face you're so happy. The leg misery isn't dramatically different between the two, it's that trudging into the dark scary forest fear from when you are a kid and moving, constantly moving, so that your legs don't stop working on you.

So at mile "50" the nice girl on Nike + Ipod told me I'd reached my goal. The race I ran was the Mountain Masochist, and the organizer didn't want to make the "50 mile" race easy, so he tacked on two miles. So I ran another mile and looked on the ground. "1 mile" meaning one mile to the finish. That sucked.

At this point it was downhill, which sounds good, but on an ultra, it's not. Your legs hurt so much at this point, particularly if you haven't been doing big distance training, that downhill is misery. I tripped on a stick, and my body slammed with adrenaline. I didn't even hit the ground, which I have a handful of times on previous runs, but when you are that exhausted your body will hit you with adrenaline that feels like an electrical shock. It feels like you've been hit by a linebacker and you can taste it. Then after you've tripped you laugh, look around to see if anyone saw you, and keep running.

At some point depending on how good of shape you are in, you are still running but just really slow. Your legs won't move, and you can try to force it mentally but they are so sapped that they don't let you do a full stride. A speed walker would trounce you at this point, you are in that zone of half-zombie like trudging, one foot ahead of the next. The cheery people at the aid station get lots of smiles at the start, and by the end smiles can become snarls. I try to crack a big goofy small when I see them because it seems to help convince your body that everything is cool, even if it's not.

The course is over jeep trails, single track covered with leaves and rocks and about 8 miles of road. At mile 37 there was one section of trail that was perfect moss covered trail, that looked like their could be hobbits padding around on it with furry feet chasing elves.

For two days after I finished I hobbled around, in pain but still operating. One of my shins felt like someone had kicked me as hard as they could, like when you are in grade school with no shin guards. But I didn't hit anything, this was just some sort of aberration of a shin splint. Both knees, right at the front where you can feel a little circular bone, hurt badly. I thought I'd sleep like the dead but for two days I had that weird hallucinogenic somewhat feverish and quite painful sleep with hectic interspersed dreams.

Of course when you are running you make a whole series of commitments to yourself, in an effort to bribe yourself into finishing the damn thing, that you will never, ever do such a thing again.

Then two days later, you get this feeling as you emerge from being so sore you can barely walk, where every cell in your body feels alive. You look around the room, and not in an arrogant way, but in a sort of it's just your secret way, konw that just about no one you see will ever run two marathons in one day. Or 4 of them in one day. I still don't consider myself a runner. I ran my first marathon in San Francisco, two days after I saw the sign on the side of the road and without training just to see if I could do it. I read in a magazine about ultras a few years after that and signed up for two 50 mile races back-to-back weekends, finished them then plotted and completed a 100 mile race. My times aren't fast, but they aren't so slow that they ask me to leave before the race is finished. I just wanted to see if I could do them. No one really cares if you finish that race, except you.

Not that it matters. Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 days, ran a 300 mile relay by himself and last year won the 135 mile Badwater race. The point is that there is always someone else out there who is badder ass and more of a madman than you are. Unless you are Dean Karnazes. It's that secret insight into your own psyche that you can do something that you never thought you can do.

In that misery is discovery.

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9 months, 3 weeks ago by Scott R.