Introduction: Its 9 days since I finished Vermont 100 and
writing a bit about it can help to reach a sense of closure about an event long
in the making and then successfully but abruptly over. It’s tiresome beyond
belief to recap every detail and yet insufficient to (nit)-pick a theme… but
more than any other distance, the 100 mile trail race is palpably a collection
of evolving stories. You feel it in your own life, I’m a husband, a father,
again-a-student, and I’m here in a field in Vermont about to do this thing,
nestled between the contexts of everything that has come before and only hazily
aware of what will be tomorrow or forever after. You feel it in those you meet
before, during and after. And you feel it in the race itself; the weather, the
course, those who put it on and those who volunteer. It’s a bundle of one-day
stories bound close and tight by common cause and passion but unlike shorter,
more breathlessly intense events, people share the trail for many hours and,
more often than not, share their stories. Not all the stories begin or end
happily but in the following micro-non-fictions I hope to convey the some of
the stories I lived, observed and heard:
One: Thursday night set camp on a grass field at the top of
a gentle, pastoral valley; one of four island tents in a sea of grass. Below us
are the trailers and tents and portable paddocks of the riders and horses. I
learn the hard way that nylon straps that gently inform the horses where to
stay are, in fact, strung through with current-bearing wires. Andrew learns
that horses eat grass, and now he eats grass, Yum!
Two: The race director, general of a small army of friends and volunteers, who makes the logistical nightmare function, periodically nurses a one year old while instructing others and checking lists. Last year not all the lists were quite checked… and a spectacular 3:30am fireworks display took both the participants and local rural residents (and especially their farm animals) by surprise, inflaming tensions and threatening the existence of the race.
Three: Years of running have given me an uncannily precise
(and perhaps unhealthy) sense for time and distance. The night before the race
I wake in the tent with Andrew nestled in the crook of my left arm, Marie
beyond, the light breeze alternates the air between three-person stuffy and middle
of the night fresh. I wonder the time, ‘it feels like 1am’ I think, and push
the button on my watch. The light illuminates 12:59:59 turning over to 1:00:00
and then 1:00:01. I smirk go back to sleep for another 90 minutes.
Four: With 5 minutes until the start of the race there are
at least 50 people waiting to use the port-a-potties… I see one friend and hug
her; I chat with a woman who I met yesterday, friendly and kind, the mother of
6 kids from 3 to 15, one of so many runners attempting their first hundred. I
end up standing next to John Gessler who I know not-at-all, but for the fact
that this is his 21st year running the race; I shake his hand and
with him luck, as if he needs it.
Five: There are many many
mistakes you can make in a 100 mile race and there are truism thrown around
a-plenty. “It’s better to show up undertrained than injured” “Ya start slow and
then slow down” “100 miles is an eating and drinking contest.” But my favorite
(did I invent it?) is “100 miles is a good-decision contest”. Perhaps it
encapsulates and subsumes the other sage advice, but I like it because it
emphasizes the cognitive and self-knowledge aspects of the sport and the
distance. Can you, through practice, experience, self-understanding, and focus
make, say 500 good decisions while only making a handful of bad ones? Having
made the rare mistake or plot twist, can you limit it to a 5 minute mistake?
Can you, in the excitement of the morning, the heat of the day or the mental
fog of the night, relentlessly see the whole board and make the right choices? And
can you see beyond the flickering, at times cowardly wants of the now-self? Can
you honor the promises of your past self and anticipate what the future you
will-have-wanted you to do?
Five-A: I start with the least ever training for such an
event but healthy, humble, with knowledge of the course and with experience on
my side. The fear of the challenge, of the future discomfort, is balanced,
paired, by a creeping pride and determination to run a relentlessly smart race.
This sounds joyless, but it’s in fact the opposite because, to soak in every
view, to meet a dozen wonderful people and have two dozen good conversations,
to laugh, to say ‘thank you’ to every volunteer, is to lighten and freshen the
mind when it, the mind, is truly the thing that tires and fails if nothing but
focus and pain are present. To run smart is to run light and joyful for as long
as possible. And, as it turns out, smart and joyful usually leads to pretty
good results.
Six: In the mid-and-late-morning I run with a woman near my age that obviously has, evidenced by her mask of concentration and some indescribable quality, run a huge number of lifetime miles. I ask if this is her first Vermont? She says, no, her 6th, and that she’d done a few others here and there around the country, and then she follows with “And I’ve never gotten one right.” It’s an extreme version of a not-uncommon theme: people struggle and fail and seem, haunted, by it. I ask “what goes wrong?” And she replies “Something different every time.” She would finish the race, but 5 hours behind me. One acquaintance is back for redemption after two DNFs, and finishes! One well-known runner surprises the people he’s talking to the day before the race by confessing “I haven’t finished this race the last three times I’ve tried… I’ve gotta break the jinx.” He finished, but there are nearly as many demons as ambitions out there, and you can feel their weight.
Seven: At mile 26 there is a huge grassy hill that you climb
(and climb and climb) that has staggering 270 degree views of hundreds of
square miles of gorgeous, green, hilly central Vermont. It’s been dubbed “Sound
of Music” Hill and with good reason. As I near the top, a guy catches up to me
and after matching strides he says, “Ya know what? Two years ago we met at this
exact and climbed the hill together.” We laugh and end up running much of the
next 25 miles together.
Eight: I run, on and off, with a group of about 8 runners
for much of the middle of the race. Some chat, some doggedly silent,
conversations ebb and flow. We climb and descend differently, use aid stations
differently but the there is a camaraderie and a sense of pack. A very
attractive young blond woman in bun-huggers and high socks gets more than her
share of conversational attention. It turns out that she and her male companion
were from Costa Rica and were on their HONEYMOON! “Actually we planned the race
first and getting married second”. She was American but moved down there after
college and fell in love with both the country and her husband. Sadly, despite
them looking good at mile 50 I could find no record of them finishing…
Nine: There is exactly one short section of trail that is
repeated in 100 miles; the very beginning of a 23 mile loop from mile 46-69. On
this section you can have little moments of empathy, of time-travel. If you
time it right you can see the leader finishing the loop as you’re just starting
it… but more wrenching, more genuflect-and-cross-inducing is finishing the loop
and seeing those heading out, knowing that if things go well for them, they
will spend nearly 8 hours longer on the course than you… knowing that what they’re
doing is, in a very real sense, harder than what you’re doing…
Nine-A: I expected to get to mile 46 (A major checkpoint) between 1pm and 2pm, 1pm was my boundry for having "gone out too fast", 1:30 being expected, and 2pm being "it's going to be a long day." As I jog into the aid station I look at my watch... 12:59:55...6...7...8...9... 1:00:00. I smirk, weigh in, eat and keep going... how does my body and mind keep doing that?
Ten: Eventually you just don’t feel great. And that scares
some people new to the sport. How can I feel like THIS halfway through and
still finish? What scares us is that feeling blah and tired and sore and slow
will lead precipitously, exponentially to horribleness, to total disaster. What
experience shows and what you must have faith in, is that, if managed properly,
one’s decline is in fact logarithmic. Yes, you are uncomfortable, but it’s
tolerable and getting worse very very slowly, so slowly in fact that you could
reach the finish line and continue well beyond if your life depended on it. This
understanding of the progress of future pain and discomfort is what is
underestimated by some and overestimated by most.
Twelve: Once you finish a 100 mile race, you stop. And having noticed that you stopped, you brain and body start to call in all the favors you’ve asked of them. A billion internal minions start the process of accessing and fixing all the damage and deprivation you’ve endured. The next few hours can range from uncomfortable to truly, deeply painful, generally worse than what the actual race feels like. There is aching, swelling, sometimes shivering, always chaffing. But if things have gone well, if you haven’t over-extended yourself, the next few hours and the next day are only humorously stiff and exhausted. An episode of the Walking Dead, shambolic runners hobble and limp about a green field in Central Vermont, stopping to chat, to exchange stories, and to express condolences to those who took on the enormous challenge of such a race, but for whom things went sideways. A race that exorcises one set of demons gives birth to more.
That’s it.
