The thing about finishing a race at around 2:00 in the morning is that you nearly always cross the finish line alone. The only people who are there to greet you are the absolute, indisputable angels known as race volunteers, and whatever incredibly kind and supportive friends or family members you have conned into sacrificial sleeplessness. Forget about the crowds you see cheering and holding signs for road races; forget race announcers and people draping foil blankets around your shoulders and post-race snack packs with bananas and chips.
Hell, it’s 2:00 in the morning. Nobody, including you, really wants to be awake.
I knew ahead of time on some level, logically, that this was what the end of my 50-mile race at Lake Martin, Alabama, was likely to be like. I knew, if I dug below the fantasy, that just before that solo cross of the timing pads I’d be somewhere in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, with nothing but the stars, my head lamp, and my hallucinations of alligators creeping toward me in the darkness, questioning all of the life choices that led me to that point.
Except I didn’t really let myself dig below the cotton candy cloud of running fantasy as I contemplated my plans to run this 50-mile race, and my fantasy bore very little resemblance to what would actually happen. For starters, in my fantasy, I finished the race several hours faster, at a more reasonable time, say, 10:00 or 10:30 pm. Also in my head there were campfires and people hanging out and sort of partying around the finish line when I finished – more like a music festival, for example, than an ultramarathon. Also in my head I still looked strong and capable as I traipsed happily across the timing pads beneath the inflatable arch, joyous and invigorated by my accomplishment.
I have a very active fantasy life.
When I first started talking to Alex, my running coach, about taking on a 50-mile race, he was supportive, in spite of the fact that I was jumping up distances pretty damn fast, having just leapfrogged to 40 miles a couple of months before, in December. Alex was especially supportive of the race I chose, which was on a flat-as-a-pancake course in East Texas. The website announced that the largest “climb” of the course was about 8 feet high, and occurred in exactly one location. Essentially, it was perfect for a newbie.
But then the East Texas race lost its permit and relocated to a sandy, sunny equestrian park with no tree cover, which automatically disqualified it in my mind (I’m a vampire and must run in shade, also sand is the WORST), and so I started looking around for another 50-miler. The only one within driving distance was the Lake Martin race in Alabama, which was a) 2 weeks earlier than my initially planned race, and b) on a course with like 7500 feet of elevation gain, rather than the planned-for 8 feet, a difference of roughly 7,492 feet in elevation. Some people might call this difference significant.
Alex did not love this. For starters, doing Lake Martin would cut out two critical weeks of training, including a bunch of the pre-race taper. Also, given that I live in a city with exactly zero “up,” he was concerned I was unprepared for vertical climbs, and would have difficulty getting prepared with the very limited training period left to us.
My husband, Charles, relies heavily on Alex to keep me from actively destroying my body, since he’s had exactly zero luck at achieving that lofty goal himself and I tend to listen to the guy I literally hired to tell me what to do because he is an expert. But this also meant that I sort of downplayed Alex’s reservations when I was telling Charles we were good to go on Lake Martin. Here’s how the conversation basically went:
Charles: So, what did Alex say?
Me: Well, he changed up my training plan some, since we’re losing two weeks. We have to crank up my running volume a little sooner.
Charles: Yes, but what did he SAY? Like, is he concerned?
Me (not meeting Charles’ eyes): I’m probably going to need to run, like, parking garages to get some vertical in my training. I mean, it’s going to be a lot of work, lots of back to backs.
Charles: Yes, but what did Alex SAY?
(Long pause.)
Me: He thinks I can do it.
Alex DID think I could do it. He just also seemed to feel that there would be a lot of suck involved, more than the average amount of suck related to running 50 miles. But Alex is a fanatical and experienced distance runner, which not only makes him a good coach, but the perfect coach for someone like me: the sort of coach who was going to do his damnedest to set me up to cross the finish line. (Charles calls this being an “enabler,” but whatever.)
I won’t dwell on training for this race, because most of it was shitty (that’s the technical term). For every run on which I felt powerful, capable, or euphoric, I had four or five runs that felt like slogging through quick-dry concrete. Most Saturdays were chewed up by preparing for, or completing, a long run (usually something between 15 and 20 miles), and then running started absorbing huge chunks of my Sundays, too, with the back-to-back effort of a medium long run (8 to 10 miles). During the week, I got up when dawn was nowhere in sight to run in the dark before getting ready for work, or to do yoga or weights to help avoid injuries. My legs never stopped feeling worn out; I felt perpetually heavy, waterlogged. Runners develop amnesia about this aspect of training so they can talk themselves into doing races, much like mothers develop amnesia about childbirth so they can talk themselves into having more kids.
Charles tried to massage the knots out of my calves as I howled in pain. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this to yourself,” he said, pressing gentle thumbs into my Achilles tendon.
“I don’t understand either,” I wailed. I didn’t.
My friend and running buddy Kate, whom I tragically left in Alabama when I moved to Louisiana for my job, came to visit on the weekend on which I hit my peak training distance before the Lake Martin 50. This peak weekend included a 20-mile run on a Saturday, and a half marathon the next day, Sunday. I watched her spring, apparently effortlessly, away from me at the starting line of the half marathon, on track to set a double-digit personal record, and slogged along behind her, not even close enough to witness her impressive progress. She ran like a gazelle, and I followed like a geriatric rhinoceros with vertigo, but I was ridiculously proud of myself as I crossed that half marathon finish line roughly a half an hour after she did, completing the 33rd of 33 miles I’d demanded of myself in less than 24 hours. I’d never asked so much from my body as I did in that training, not once in my 44 years of life, up to and including giving birth to two human beings, but I was pretty sure that this meant I was prepared for my race.
Ha.
We drove to the Lake Martin area on Friday, the day before the race started. We’d rented a little condo roughly a half an hour’s drive from the starting line, which was the closest an online rental could get us. I was grappling with a head cold that had attacked me on Monday, so I drank some Theraflu and went to bed early after giving Charles the bad news about when my alarm was going to go off in the morning: 4:15 am. The race started at 6:30 and I needed plenty of time to eat and get to the starting line and go to the bathroom and do all of the things you do before lighting out into the woods for an undetermined period of time.
But I awakened even before the alarm went off, my body thrumming with nervous excitement. This was my sick Christmas morning, my dysfunctional Disneyworld: the opportunity to make myself run all day long and at least a reasonable chunk of the night, too. My brain did not understand why we were excited, but everything else in me knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were. I looked in the mirror as I applied 100 SPF to my face. “Why are you so freaking happy about this?” I asked myself.
“No idea,” I answered me.
“It’s still night,” Charles said, as we trudged to the car together. We looked up at the charcoal lid of the sky. “It’s not even a little bit morning.” He wasn’t wrong.
It can be hard, out there during a tough race or long run gone wrong, to remember that we choose these mental and physical tests. We are fortunate to experience these events.
Rob Steger, Training for Ultra
(Left: Me and Charles in the car before walking to the starting line at a little after 6:00 am. He is clearly a prince among men.)
Cars maneuvered over uneven, unpaved ground, looking for a place to park near the start/ finish line. Runners fiddled with hydration vests, hats, jackets – athletic zombies in the pre-dawn. I joined my running team near the starting line and saw in so many eyes the combination of determination, excitement, and anxiety that I felt. But they all seemed so much more capable than I was, so much more fit and strong and powerful and unstoppable. They were everything I was afraid I wasn’t.
One of the bonuses to running this race was that Alex was there, not just coaching the team but running the 27-mile race that happened at the same time as the 50 and 100 mile races. “You’re looking strong,” he said. “Feeling good?”
“Absolutely,” I said, and, in that moment, I was. I knew that ultramarathon legend Dean Karnazes was right when he said something along the lines of, “In an ultramarathon, whether you feel good, or you feel bad, it will pass,” so I was committed to leaning into the good moments.
I made a brand new friend, Maryjo, in the line for the bathroom, dangerously close to the starting shot. The two women in front of us in line bailed out, apparently unwilling to risk starting late. I caught the eye of the petite blonde in front of me and said, “I’d rather start late with an empty bladder than start on time having to pee.”
“Oh, yes, definitely,” she said.
And that sort of bathroom-based sisterhood is how Maryjo and I came to run the first 20 miles together. Somewhere around mile 3 we picked up Brittany. By the time Maryjo peeled off to finish the last seven miles of the 27-miler, which was the distance she’d signed up for, we knew enough about each others’ lives to pose a credible blackmail threat to one another.
We ran as we watched the sun rise, and spill golden over the tops of the trees, prisming through leaves and casting kaleidoscopic patterns on the forest floor. The chill of the early morning subsided into daytime cool. We ran over tree roots on single-track trails, and on the packed earth of fire roads. We power hiked the hills, and did a little tripping jog on the downhill. We shared secrets we hadn’t confided to our therapists, made loose and careless and open by the challenge of the run and the beauty of the day and our own blossoming exhaustion.
“Why do you think you do this?” I asked them at one point in time, as we trudged toward the aid station optimistically called “Heaven Hill.” (This appellation only became true late in the evening when they started serving grilled cheese sandwiches there.)
“Because,” Brittany said, “it’s just the right amount of pain.” (There was a lot to unpack here, including the notion that there is some amount of pain that is “right.”)
“Because running makes you feel powerful and alive,” Maryjo said. “And there’s nothing like being outdoors.”
“But couldn’t we theoretically get that on a five-mile run in the woods?” I asked. It was a real question.
There was a pause. Then Maryjo said, “No.”
She was right, but none of us seemed able to explain why.
Partway through the loop that took us from mile 19 to mile 25, I ran completely out of water. I’d miscalculated how much was left in my hydration pack by thinking that the extra pair of socks I’d stashed in the back pocket was a full container of water instead. This loop had a lot of vertical climbing, and was also during the heat of the day, two things that made running out of water more than usually suboptimal.
By the time I met Charles at the halfway point I was struggling with abdominal cramps and feeling disproportionately fatigued, two things that can piggyback on dehydration. He brought me a sandwich I didn’t eat and a change of clothes and looked at me with worried eyes. I chugged a Gatorade. “I will be absolutely fine,” I told him.
“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced.
Brittany and I went out on the second loop of the race together; Maryjo had wrapped up her 27 miles and gotten her finisher’s medal. The optimism and easy conversation that had marked the first loop had fallen away, swallowed by afternoon heat and fatigue. As the sun slid downward, behind the lush, reaching tree line, Brittany started talking about her blisters, which is never a good sign. By the time it was full dark and we hit the Heaven Hill Aid Station for the last time, about mile 39, her small blister problem had become a large blister problem, and she had to drop.
“I hate to abandon you,” she said.
“It’s not abandonment,” I told her. “Go take care of yourself, my friend. I’m good.”
I actually was. There was a big part of me that wanted to embrace this last stretch alone, so continuing solo was just what I wanted, although I felt sad that Brittany was ending her race in a way no runner wants to end it. I had reached the real start of the race for me – Mile One beyond the longest distance I’d ever traversed. I was already at that place where your body is so worn that your mind becomes clear and empty and the only thing that matters is putting one foot in front of the other, running to that next tree, past that next boulder.
Jessica Goldman, an ultra runner who traversed the distance from San Francisco to New York solo and unsupported in 2014, said, “Being alone gives you the ability to reinvent yourself at any time. . . Endurance sports frequently involve ugly crying, swearing, and moments of hysteria that might be better done in privacy. If an athlete falls apart in the forest, and no one was around to hear it, did they make a sound?”
It was close to midnight when I went out on the last 6-mile loop, the one with a lot of vertical, the place where I’d run out of water the first time, between miles 19 and 26. Now it was miles 44 to 50. I made sure I had a full hydration vest, but I was no longer able to keep down solid food. My nausea was overwhelming, and swamped me in waves.
Endurance races are a microcosm of life; you’re high, you’re low, in the race, out of the race, crushing it, getting crushed, managing fears, rewriting stories.
Travis Macy
That’s Brittany in the blue. I’m in black, like a chubby ninja.
In the city, it never really gets fully dark. The ambient light from urban activities casts a pale sheen into the sky, obscuring the starlight, filming over the moon. Light permeates the oxygen. But out in the woods, miles from the closest small town, the stars are sharp as diamonds. The moon that night was misshapen and yellow, like a runner’s toenail. It was after midnight, and I was alone, a solitary sailor in a vast and treacherous sea.
I was moving so slowly at that point that my movement did not merit being called “running”; it barely merited being called movement. I stopped, threw up, started again, puked again. Three miles from finishing, it occurred to me that if quitting was an option at this point, I was no longer 100% sure that I wouldn’t take it.
Then I did the stupidest thing an ultrarunner can do in the middle of the night when they’re nowhere near the finish line. I stepped off the trail and sat down on a pile of leaves by a tree. I just needed to rest for a minute, I told myself. Just to regroup.
Logic had sprinted rapidly away from me at that point, and flashed me just before turning the corner in the distance. I was mildly hallucinating that the reflector tags on the flags marking the trail were the eyes of tiny demons inching toward me. My stomach was making ungodly sounds that should not be made by any stomachs, ever.
Twin headlamps bobbed into visibility over the crest of the hill I’d summitted before collapsing on the side of the trail, and a few moments later a man and a woman ran into sight, clearly far more capable runners in the process of running the 100-mile race. They slowed as they neared me.
“Are you okay?” they asked, because runners are the best people you will ever meet.
“It’s not my best night ever,” I admitted, before telling them that the nausea was absolutely kicking my ass at that exact moment. (If I died out on the trail, I wanted someone to be able to clue the coroner in as to a cause.)
It turned out the woman runner happened to be carrying anti-nausea medication, which she generously shared with me. This event was so unlikely that it neared the threshold of impossibility, and if the medication hadn’t worked I would have assumed that the runners were just an unusually complex hallucination. I thanked them both, and they ran on, and I swallowed the pill she gave me and then laid back on my trailside bed of leaves.
My garbled mind had decided that I needed a 10-minute nap while the pill kicked in, before I finished the last few miles of the race. But the temperature had dropped significantly since dusk, and was hovering just below 40 degrees. My entire body started shaking with the cold. I turned off my headlamp and stared up at the dark and limitless sky, letting the stars run through me like icicle blades.
The whole situation was ridiculous: shivering here in the woods after a day and and evening of running, after taking a pill from a run-by drugstore delivery service. I started to laugh at myself, and I thought of Charles asking me why I was doing this, and of Maryjo and Brittany and why they did this, and why I was grateful to the point of senseless euphoria to be here, shaking, in a pile of moldy leaves in Southern Alabama in the middle of the &*%$#@ night.
There wasn’t a single why.
Like the stars, there were incalculable reasons, a wealth of reasons.
There were so many whys that I had already gone through dozens on this run, and I might go through a dozen more before I made it across the finish line. I ran this race because I wanted to be with other people who felt the same way that I did about doing stupid hard things in nature, because I was delighted that my 44-year-old body with no athletic aptitude was strong enough to run for hours and hours, because I’d gotten to meet new people and find out about their lives over hours and hours of running, because I loved the point of clarity that always seemed to coincide with extreme physical exertion, because I was lucky enough to see the sun rise and set over the same beautiful landscape through a day of climbing and falling. Because I was in love with being alive, because doing insanely hard things made me feel like I was dancing in the most intense mosh pit at the best concert life had to offer. Because I love other runners, because no grilled cheese sandwich tastes as good as the one you eat in a tent in the woods after running 33 miles, because I got to prove to myself that I’m a badass, because only the luckiest of the very lucky get to see the world this way.
Two minutes after deciding to rest for 10 minutes, on my back still staring at the stars, I realized that shaking from the cold was a very bad sign and that this was probably how people died from hypothermia and I better start running again.
The night stretched out in front of me like the trail, and it felt infinite but peaceful. After what felt like six or seven days but was probably a matter of minutes I saw an actual, literal building come into view, which meant I was only about three quarters of a mile from the end of the race.
I had enough in me to run across the finish line. No other runners were anywhere in sight, most of the 50-mile runners having either finished before me (or not at all), and the 100-mile runners spread out over the entirety of the 25-mile course. It was 2:00 am, and I crossed the finish line alone, anticlimactically, in the deepest part of night. Like I really, logically, knew I would.
Charles was there, with Gatorade and hot soup in a thermos. It was the best soup I had ever had in my whole life. A very kind and very tired race volunteer found me the correct finisher’s medal. And Charles helped my sore and staggering body into the passenger seat of the car.
“I hate to see you in pain,” my saint of a husband said, driving us back to our rental condo. “I was really worried about you this time, with the dehydration and all. Could you maybe think of doing triathlons or something instead? Those would be really hard, but maybe not tear you up like this.”
“Sure,” I said, because it was nearly 3 am and I was beyond spent. “You got it.” But we both knew I was lying. I was absolutely going to do this again.
I woke up noon-ish and read a text from Alex that he sent at something like 8:30 in the morning, checking on me to make sure I wasn’t still out on the trail, possibly dead.
“I’m fine,” I texted back. “Totally finished. Just thought sending a text at 2 am was a real jerk move.”
“I checked Strava and saw it,” he typed. “I’m so stinking proud of you!”
I had trouble walking for a couple of days; the downhills had wrecked me more than anything else. Also, the process of sitting down = no fun. But then I recovered. And then I decided to find a cheap stair climber to deal with the lack of vertical in my home city, because the next time I run up and down hills for a longer distance than most people prefer to drive, I want to be ready. (The stair climber is Satan’s invention, but I’m using it.)
I’m registered for a 100k (62 miles) in November; between now and then, there’s a 35-mile race in Georgia I’m also planning to run. Alex, somewhat to Charles’ chagrin, thinks maybe I’ll even be ready for a 100-mile race sometime next year.
The truth is, even when I was immediately post race and struggling to climb into the shower unassisted, even when I was icing my quadriceps and checking out my new blisters, I did not have a single moment when I wanted this race to be the last long race, not a single moment when I wanted to stop for good. I don’t have one single good reason why I want to continue to put myself (and Charles, if we’re honest) through this.
Honestly, I have too many to count.
Love your story congratulations on being a badass! RR member Dale L.
Thank you so much, Dale!