Arrived back from Houston this morning and sadly I had no internet access from my Hunstville Motel Room hence the delay in posting any kind of news on here.
The journey out to Houston was as uneventful as I could have hoped for. The 10 hour flight went like a dream with no interruptions and I managed to get some good rest spread out across three seats in the very back row of the plane. The new airline formed out of the merger between Continental and United has left behind probably the best carrier service I've flown with for a very long time. We were told on taking off that the weather in Houston was horrendous with mixed freezing snow and rain icing up the runway. About an hour before landing the pilot let us know that the storm was sufficiently far south for us to land without issue and that hiatus was actually enough time for me to collect the hire car and make the hour drive up I45 to Huntsville where the race is held. I hit the sack straight away not wanting to change my body clock as per the last time I was there for the race. The idea of that being that given the 6 hour time difference if I got to bed at 6pm and woke up at 3am, I would time things perfectly for race morning when we would start at 6am.
I got up at 3am on Friday and went outside to make the drive over the I45 to Wal Mart and stock up on supplies. Unfortunately the entire car was engulfed in a quarter of an inch of ice. It had been blown on by freezing cold winds and was rock hard so it took me literally half an hour to get moving. The roads hadn't been gritted so were extremely slippery. When I turned up at Wal Mart obviously there wasn't a soul in sight but this is America and it was a 24 hour store. I went inside and spent an hour cruising around buying tortillas, turkey, cheese, chips, fruit, bagels, water etc etc most of which were for the race. I spent the rest of the day watching tv in the room waiting for Ian to arrive and for the pre race meeting to start. Ian got in around 2pm and we hit the streets of Huntsville for a 3 mile - ish slow run just to loosen up before the morning.
We got to registration and the race briefing was in full flow, so we snuck around the side and checked in to collect our race numbers and swag bags. At this point Ian met up with his crew for the race, Paul and Meredith Terranova and we spent some time out in the hall with Meredith chatting about different races and his plan of action for the morning. Ian has been running at the top level for a while now. In the lead up to the race we spoke a lot about the speed the other guys in the field had vs his own success on road in particular and how this course might suit him better. Knowing what happened now makes this post from a few weeks ago a little more pertinent!!!! http://runthroughtime.blogspot.com/2011/01/11-days-to-go.html
Meredith and Paul were obviously extremely accomplished runners, Paul recently finishing 2nd just behind Ian in TNF50km in December. They had also had success in pacing runners to success on this course helping 4 previous runners to wins with some breaking CR's in the process. After a massive pasta dinner I left my drop bag with supplies for the Dam Road aid station at mile 6.5/ 12.5 and head back to the hotel for the night.
I got up at 3am for the race with a good nights sleep under my belt. Having run this one before and having done a number of races significantly more challenging since I didn't have pre match nerves. I knew I was capable of running the time that I wanted as long as things went to plan and I really didn't have any other pressures on me than that. If it all worked out then great and I would have the pleasure of watching some of the greats in the sport battle it out up the front of the field due to the lapped format.
I got to the start at 4:45am and it was 23 degrees F outside or minus 5 centigrade in English money. I jumped out of the car and checked my name off of the list and after 5 minutes outside I was freezing cold and shivering. Not a nice start to the morning. I stayed in the warm until 5:54am and then jogged over to the start, switched on my headlamp and joined the Ian a row back from the front. I looked at the line of runners in front of us and left to right picked out Tony Krupicka, Scott Jurek, Hal Koerner, Karl Meltzer a couple of unknown guys and Zach Gingerich on the right. Ian looked ready with his camelbak on and we wished each other good luck before Joe the RD set us on our way at exactly 6am.
The pace at the beginning was slower than I'd expected. I say that with the exception of Zach who sprinted away down the 100 yard straight and wide trail from the start/ finish line. He was out of sight within 30 seconds and that was kind of a shock to see as I imagine it was for all of the other guys. As we got into the first little section of narrower trail the lead guys began to pull away and I was running in maybe 20th spot with a group of 4 guys running together. As we spread out even a few yards it became apparent that my head torch was pitifully weak. I'd changed down from my heavy duty Petzl to a smaller model as I knew I'd only need it for about 45 minutes but it did nothing to cut through the pitch black of the woods. I tripped a few times on the prominent roots and nearly crashed into a tree by one of the many boardwalks in the first 2 miles or so. Neverthless I made good time to the nature centre at mile 3.1 in about 25 minutes and as we got on to the trail to the Dam Road Station at mile 6.5 the sun began to come up and reveal a beautiful day on the trails. The rest of the first 20 mile loop just disappeared in a flash and I was back to the 2 mile out and back section to the start in about 2:45 or so. At that point I knew I would see the front runners coming back past me and sure enough there was Zach running at mile 21.7/ 18.3 for me which put him on roughly 3:05 marathon pace. A couple of minutes later, Ian came past and I gave him some words of encouragement. Directly behind him were Scott, Hal, Anton, Karl, Mike Wolfe and a couple of other guys all running together. Scott was the only one to exchange words as we went past and I kind of guessed that figured as they were all working so hard. I hit 20 miles in 3:02 in 30th spot.
My pacing strategy was simple and was to go 20 hours split down as Loop 1: 3 hours. Loop 2: 3:30. Loop 3: 3:30. Loop 4: 4:30. Loop 5: 5 hours. At 4 mph for the last loop I knew I'd have plenty of fat in there to push towards my best case target of 18 hours. I knew that would be enough for top 20 even with the strength of the field in question and I felt it was achievable before hand.
For loop 2 I grabbed a handheld bottle and some more gels and made good speed out of the gate. I'd run the whole of the first loop including all of the 'bumps' (not really long enough to call them hills). It would be wrong to describe this course as flat as there are some minor undulations which amount to about 5500 feet over 100 miles but you just wouldn't find a trail flatter than this unless you look at canal towpaths which clearly offer the fastest possible terrain, short of road, on which to run. Loop 2 I began to speed hike some of the slightly longer shallow inclines to conserve energy. The heat came up a bit and I hit the marathon point in about 4:05 which was spot on. As I made it out to the 50km point I could feel the ITB in my right leg, ever present in all of my training, tighten up particularly on the downhill sections and it certainly put the fear in to me a little. I tried to protect it where I could but with shin splints in my left leg in the run up to the race also, it was really about balancing the whole situation so that neither became my undoing. I felt a little like I was running on a knife edge and that either could cause a big issue at any time. Still I made decent progress on lap 2 and came back in to the start finish in 6:32, 2 minutes off of target pace and still in exactly 30th place.
Loop 3 I intended to continue running as much of as possible. My legs felt a little weary but as is natural after 40 miles of running and everything else was running as smooth as I could have possibly hoped. I allowed myself to start to think about how many problems with injury and illness I'd suffered in the 12 week build up to this race and how I had always hoped that things would just come together on race day and that the big guy upstairs would allow me to travel the course without any single problem coming to a head. I power hiked the inclines, made it through the 50 mile point in 8:09, stayed sensible with my nutrition and hydration, taking on lots of enduralytes as the heat came up a little towards the low 60s and made good progress back to the 100km mark in 10:27 about 3 minutes up on my plan. By this point, Ian had already come past me on his 4th lap and looked fantastic, flowing freely and easily in a bouncing fashion right down the track. He had a lead now and clearly was out to push that lead rather than sit back and try and hold it.
Loop 4 began in daylight but quickly descended into darkness so I had my torch and a second layer ready. I started to hike a lot more of the trail and knowing that I had 4 hours 30 for this loop I could afford to conserve a lot of energy and have a faster last lap as a result. As I went through 65 miles or so, Ian came barrelling back down the trail past me with Meredith and we had a shouted conversation whereby he informed me he was running a half an hour under CR pace for a 12:45 projected finishing time. I was pretty much speechless. He was obviously going to stamp his name into the record books and put his name on the map of world ultra running. I tried not to get too distracted in his success as I was aware I had a big job left to do myself. I pressed on through Dam Road and on the long lonely ATV trail up to the 70 mile Far Point timing mat which I reached almost bang on 12:30 still pacing perfectly. As I head up the single track from mile 70 to 72 I could feel my leg tightening but nothing worse than I'd had all day. The temperature had dropped massively, around 20 degrees in the space of only an hour and a half and I could feel the cold starting to get in to me so I pushed the pace a little out on the dam and into the aid station at mile 73. I grabbed a large cup of mashed potato which I'd been eating all day and was frankly a revelation and made my way out of there without stopping. At that point I had spent a maximum of 30 seconds at any one aid station all day so hadn't wasted any extra time. As I got on to a section of slightly steeper descent at around mile 74 my right knee pretty much gave way. Anyone who has had ITB issues in the past will know that feeling, when you're running along with no issue and all of a sudden it feels like someone has jammed their thumb right into the side of your kneecap and it almost makes it feel like the leg will collapse. I gathered myself quickly and tried to walk through it but it pretty much seized up and the flex I'd had in it to that stage went entirely to the point where it was locked pretty much straight. I knew I had 2 miles to the aid station so figured I would walk it in and try and shake it off over that time.
This section of trail is a jeep road which undulates down the far side of the park on really easy and very runnable packed sand. I was, however, reduced to an absolutely crippling hobble, striding with my left leg and swinging my right around like a club foot, placing as little pressure on the knee as possible and taking all my weight back on to my left as soon as I physically could. I carried on for maybe half an hour in that fashion with my head down just plugging away. As the knee became tighter and tighter I could feel the ITB stretching across the knee and literally creaking as i held it in place. The temperature was back down to single figures and I knew that wasn't helping the situation. That jeep road became an absolute bastard and I was reduced to going tree to tree for the 2 miles. I managed to make it in to the aid station at mile 76.2 in just over 15 hours. When I worked back I realised it had taken me over 2 hours to cover 3 miles and that had been with a pretty good pace for the first mile of that. I knew my race was out of the window at that point and that I couldn't shake this problem off. I had two choices, continute on and with 15 hours left in the race, hope that my leg eased up a bit to allow me to continue at the previous pace of just over a mile an hour and finish the last 24 in time, or call it a day.
I went back to Rocky Raccoon this year for one reason, to see how fast I could run 100 miles. That would seem to be a little pointless to some people but in the 3 previous attempts at the distance, all of which ended in success but ultimately included long stretches of walking and struggling, I felt I hadn't really had the race I was capable of. In 2009 in my first 100 miler I'd run the course in a very respectable 22:54. When I worked out the average pace I'd need to complete the remaining 24 miles in, I knew it was impossible for me to better that time albeit I was, even with the 2 hours of crawling along, way way ahead of my 2009 splits. I actually left the 76.2 mile point and made my way down the trail back to the start finish. Around 5 minutes in I'd only made a couple of hundred yards at the most and could still see the lights behind me. I stood still felt my knee which was severely inflamed and thought screw this. It wasn't even that difficult a decision. I knew I would hate myself for DNFing a race but I came to the realisation that 1. I have another opportunity to run a decent 100 mile time at Umstead in under 2 months time and that having managed to get into Western States this year and the Grand Slam, this race paled into insignificance versus those things. If I did lasting damage by battling out the rest of the course I would be inconsolable. I turned around and made my way back to the aid station and that was that. 76 miles of very hard work and 12 weeks of training undone in under 3 hours.
That for me exemplifies the massive gulf between 50 miles/ 100km races and 100 miles. That last 40 miles of a 100 is a totally different level to any other running. Of course the longer you are on your feet, the greater the opportunity there is for something to go wrong. The last 40 miles of a 100 will, for most people, involve a huge amount of walking. Given that, you end up being on your feet for the same time again as the initial 60 miles might have taken. When it gets dark and cold and you're whole body is depleted and in pain it is easy to make mistakes like forgetting to eat and drink or take on salt, or, in my case here, get injured by being sloppy with your gait/ tripping over etc etc.
I hitched a lift back to the start line with one of the volunteers and dragged my leg the 20 yards or so into the start finish tent where I found Ian sitting in a chair surrounded by ultra running legends and admirers alike. He had finished in a time of 12:44 and in the process set the fastest ever time for trail 100 miles on US soil. Tony Krupicka and Hal Koerner had come in shortly after him in 13:18 and 13:24 respectively, both also astonishingly quick times. Ian was humble but obviously elated and after about an hour of sitting around everyone dispersed and head back to their respective hotels.
When I got up the next morning my leg felt dreadful. Negotiating stairs was almost impossible, but we jumped in the car and went back to the start finish to watch some of the last runners come home. There is something really special about watching people who have been out battling their inner demons for 28/29/30 hours finally cross that finishing line. It's a moment you don't forget in a hurry and obviously from my perspective I had huge pangs of regret for not struggling on round to finish. At the same time I also felt what I can only describe was almost pride in myself for not being as stubborn as usual and going on to cause long term damage to prove a point I had proved many times before.
Having spent a little time there we head over to the post race breakfast where Ian recieved many contgratulations for his stellar performance. Watching him sign autographs was kind of surreal and I know he felt the same way, but this is a big and growing community and all of a sudden he had gone from a recognised name albeit on a kind of unknown level, to stardom, overnight. I felt delighted for him that he'd achieved something truly special and that he was about to start getting the kind of support and respect he had probably deserved for some time. It's going to be seriously exciting to watch him race in the future.
For me the question is how long will be off my feet. On top of the knee I have some serious plantar fasciis going on in my right foot and an exacerbated shin split problem in my left leg. I have 8 weeks to umstead so whilst it was no bad bad thing to have got in a 76 mile training run, if I'm out of action fo 6 - 8 weeks it will make Umstead a race too soon. I will travel there irrespective as I have pre paid for flights and entry but as to what capacity I'll be in, racing 100, running 50 or pacing pete for a lap or two who knows. As for Rocky Raccoon you can never say never but I doubt I'll be back. Finishing it once ticks the box and this years DNF doesn't detract from that at all. I still had an awesome time and am pretty sure that if my knee had lasted the course I would have been able to pocket a time somewhere between 18:30 and 19:30 which would have made it a successful start to the year. Still you roll with the punches and in ultra running you will get KO'd occasionally. Hey after all Scott Jurek dropped at 60 miles so I feel my decision was kind of validated by his ;)
Until next time....
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