Drummer Hill 50K
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As I staggered down into the trail head at the end of loop three, my head was fuzzy, I was thirsty, my legs were tired, and my back was sore. I had just run off course to add maybe a mile to the race. I was five hours in and over 22 miles done and the thought crossed my mind that maybe I’d done enough.
But, this was one of those moments. I knew it was coming. It had already started to suck. But that’s the whole point with ultras. To find the suck, make friends with it and move ahead. That’s why we do it. We know that in every ultra, sometimes more than once, there is going to be appoint where you get to choose to keep going.
And that, my friends is one of the most life-affirming moments we have. To find that place and decide to keep going. Because, experience will tell you, unless there is a bone sticking out or you’re coughing up blood, it’s not going to get any worse. The decision is just more of the same.
It’s a decision that says “Hey, I’m ok with a little discomfort. I’m ok with me.”
I figured once I got into loop four, the final loop, it would just take care of itself, everything would be ok. The decision to turn around and head back up the trail made the rest of the race inevitable.
So, I stopped drafting the apologetic, whiney email to my coach in my head. The one with all the sensible excuses. I walked to my cooler to restock my supplies.
The race director asked if he could fill my water pack, and I was, shall we say, ‘snippy’ with him. (Okay, I was 3rd-lap bitchy – it’s real thing, look it up.) Late race mental state has the interesting symptom of removing social filters.
I said, “Last time you over-filled it. Do you not know how much a liter is?” In my defense, it’s a two-liter bladder and I didn’t need two liters and didn’t want to lug the extra weight up and down all that technical vertical on this course that HE had designed.
I compromised by handing him a bottle of water from my cooler and said, “Here, use this.” Meanwhile I took a couple more Endurolytes and grabbed another bottle of Nuun.
Pack filled appropriately, and no really good excuses left, I fished out my phone and turned the volume down a bit, packed it back in, and turned to hike back up the first friggin hill for the fourth time. For some reason I yelled “105 out of transition”.
…
My training was good. No really. I came into this race healthier than I’ve been in the last five years. Since my last marathon at the end of January it has been a solid 3-month cycle. I transitioned off the roads and into my happy place – the trails around my house with my dog. Not a ton of mileage, like I used to do when I was a pup, but 3-4 solid hour and a half sessions a week with long runs on Saturday. Strength and yoga on the off days. Good enough to maintain my ‘avoid debilitating injury’ goal.
For an ultra the load was light. My peak week was in the 50’s and we spun the long run up to 20 miles on the trails. I was able to practice wearing the water pack and nutrition and equipment. All very easy peasy and nothing bad. As a veteran runner on the backslope of my career this is exactly my sweet spot now.
So yeah – very happy with this training cycle. It was work, but it was the right amount and kind of work.
Casting about for a race in May, I scheduled the Drummer Hill 50K as a proof point. “A proof point for what?” you ask. For my ability to pace Eric at Western States in June.
Pacing is a commitment. If you commit to pacing, you’d better damn well be able to do it. It’s one thing to screw up your own race but its bad form to fuck up someone else’s by not training well. Especially when it’s Eric and it’s Western States!
I figured 50K was a good distance to see how the old body performed. Drummer Hil was a small race in Keene NH at the right weekend on the calendar and close enough to my house to be same day drivable.
Based on my training, this 50K should not have be an issue. I mean, it’s always going to be challenging to run 30 miles, but if you’re trained, it’s not that big a deal. Everything added up to a good day. My long runs in my trails, on tired legs, with a full water pack, at an easy effort were all coming in under 12-minute miles. The math pointed out that on fresh, tapered legs I should be able to knock out 50K in 6ish hours.
I was not training to PR or podium. I was training to finish the distance and run strong through the finish. In my long training runs I used a 4-1 cadence, and yes, Jeff Galloway personally told me to do this. So, run 4 minutes then hike for a minute and repeat. This keeps me from working too hard early and really smooths out the effort. Even with the 1-minute hikes I was still coming in at a sub 12 minute mile on the trails, which at my age I will take and be happy about it.
So, training, check. Prepared, check. Now all I had to do was survive the taper.
The weekend before Drummer Hill I drove to Arlington to help my daughter move houses. I wondered how I’d feel after all the lifting and carrying and driving. I was tickled pink to have no ill effects at all. Not sore, not tired, no ill-effect from carrying boxes and furniture. Huh. With all that lifting and hauling it was like a really easy Spartan race.
I was well-trained, strong and healthy – and moving well into overconfidence.
The only wildcard might be weather. As this is New England in May, there was always the chance of the weather dice rolling wrong and getting a hot day. But even this fell in my favor. As race day approached the bullet was dodged. Race day started mid-forties and overcast!
Great racing weather forecast. This was turning out to be a yawner. I got myself a proactive massage and tried to watch my diet for the last week and get lots of sleep.
Race day, race ready. In the run up I organized my ultra-stuff in my ultra-bag. I have an ultra-stuff bag. Doesn’t everyone?
I packed up a cooler and organized nutrition. I wondered what to bring. On my long runs so far this cycle I really hadn’t worries too much about nutrition. I carried some bananas maybe, or oranges, and/or a handful of dates. I really like dates for race fuel. Great sugar boost and very digestible in a nice compact user format. Dates good for long runs.
Fishing through the ultra-stuff bag, I found some unused Nuun tablets g and mixed up 3 bottles. Better safe than sorry.
Saturday morning, I packed it all up into the truck and drove the hour and a half Northwest to the race start. This is not the kind of race where you have ‘an expo’ or anything like that. This is the kind of race where you have a handful of scruffy-looking characters at a folding table in a parking lot.
My kind of race.
I dropped my cooler and extra-clothes backpack at the trail head and chit chatted with the other runners. I had a couple friends there who were affiliated with my running club.
The course:
Drummer Hill is a loop course with four 12.5K loops. Which is great for self-support by staging your stuff at the trailhead. Very convenient. Quite manageable.
It was a cool day. My original plan was to start in a long sleeve and switch to a short sleeve when it warmed up. But the long sleeve I brought had the stinky shirt disease and was already acting anti-social so swapped for a short-sleeve-plus-light gloves option.
I put a liter of water in my pack, which is half-full. My reasoning was that there was an aid station and it was a loop course so I really didn’t need to carry all that water. I had a baggy full of dates with me in case I got hungry. I had the Nuun bottles, and some Gatorade bottles and a baggie full of Gu’s and some bottles of water and a couple Keytone-IQ shots.
I brought the Gu-gels because they were also in the ultra-stuff bag, but, the older I get the more I hate Gu’s so they were more of a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ item.
I also had some Endurolyte capsules, but with the cold weather I wasn’t super worried about cramping.
I wore my Grateful Dead Steal Your Face hat, because, you know, trail races. I decided not to bring my phone or my headphones to start. I could pick them up if I needed them for later loops. My experience is that the first loop has enough friendly conversation and you don’t need to be encumbered.
We started promptly at 8:00AM. There were around a hundred people at the start. A lot of them were only doing the one or two loop options. Everyone was having a good time. I love trail races. Trail runners are super chill. The first loop was conversational and chummy and great.
But the course surprised me. Leaning on a long tradition of not paying attention to the course before I start, I discovered it was a lot harder than I expected.
Right from the start we were heading uphill. Significantly uphill. Then we dropped off the rough fire road and into technical single path. Still uphill.
I had planned to run my normal 4-1 training ratio, but with all the technical uphill, that was impossible. I was forced into a more ad hoc hiking and running cadence that adapted to what the course gave me. I had the thought “Well, it’s a loop course, so it can’t all be up hill, and when I find the down hill bits I can make up some time.”
Which wasn’t a great strategy. Because the downhills were so technical you couldn’t relax. Basically, you were fighting the course the whole time. So working on the uphills and then working on the downhills.
I fell in with a nice, friendly group and we chatted our way through to the one aid station which was about 5 miles in. It seemed to take forever to get to that aid station. But when we did get there, it was what you’d expect in an ultra. Lots of food. Candy, peanut and jelly sandwiches, bananas, and my personal favorite; watermelon. I had half a banana.
Based on what people who had run the course before told me, it would be downhill out of the aid station to the start-finish transition point. But that turned out to be false intelligence. That was last year’s course. This year was a new course layout and after the aid station we got slammed into another technical uphill. I may have started to utter some foul language every time I turned a corner and was confronted with more technical uphill.
Eventually we rejoined the course we had already run and ran the technical uphill of the start back down. There was two-way traffic and I got to see the leaders (and the 60% of the runners who were faster than me) coming and going.
I finished up loop one, cruised into the exchange feeling fine. But, I felt like I had worked hard. I looked at my watch and was a full 20 minutes slower than my training paces.
Huh. What happened to that ‘will do much better on tapered legs’ stuff? I started doing math in my head and it made me unhappy so I buried all that away and got reloaded for loop two. I drank some of the Nuun and ate an Endurolyte and a couple of dates.
The race volunteers asked if I wanted my water packed filled. I said “Sure, but only a liter.” An instruction that was perhaps too vague, because they filled it up and I spent some time sucking mouthfuls and spitting them out on that first uphill trying to bring the payload down to where I wanted it. I was able to drop my gloves, but it was still quite cool. I was sweating but I certainly didn’t need all that water.
I was carrying my baggie full of dates, my primary race fuel, in the outer mesh compartment of my pack and when I grabbed a couple in the exchange, (after they handed me my overfull backpack) I found they had all escaped from the baggie and were now rattling around loose in the mesh.
“Who cares?” I thought to myself. I threw out the empty baggie and left them loose in there figuring feral dates would not make a difference and would be easier to access.
The second loop was more of the same. I was trying to figure out the topography of the course so I wouldn’t need to battle so much. My original strategies were out the window. With all the up and down technical, I just couldn’t find a groove. It felt like a frustrating combination of working too hard to move too slow.
On that first climb I stubbed a toe and pitched forward. I caught myself with my hands, but all the dates cascaded out into the trail in front of me. Ah well. I wasn’t going to fish around in the dirt for them. I’d manage.
That second loop I was still thinking about how slow I was going and trying to race and working hard. Not a great strategy. I was slowly coming to a more sanguine conclusion that the time was what it was and there was no sense beating myself to death against the rocks of New Hampshire.
I also managed to find the comparison I had been looking for. If I had to describe the course, I’d describe it as a Mountain Race. I have run plenty of mountain races and that’s what it felt like.
Towards the end of the 2nd loop I was feeling a bit challenged. I was tired. My feet were sore from all the root and rock prancing, and I was starting to worry that it might turn into a death march. The spiral death loop thinking goes something like this… “The course is different and way harder than I expected. Is this going to manifest in crushing leg fatigue and cramps in the final loop? What can I do? This fucking race is going to take all day at this rate.”
One more thing I haven’t mentioned is “The medical condition.” Euphemisms aside, I have developed a worsening case of amblyopia over the past three months. “What is amblyopia?” You ask. Well in a nutshell it is double vision. I think it has something to do with all the hours I have spent editing the second novel in my five-novel apocalyptic fiction series “After the Apocalypse.” (Shameless plug inserted. Coming to everywhere you buy books in June, book two, ‘Killer’.)
Anyhow, when I get tired my left eye wanders off and I see double. Which is super annoying for things like, say, driving or running headlong down a technical trail trying not to trip and die. Which means that by the end of loop two I was having to run a lot of sections with one eye closed which is crappy for depth perception.
I guess I should describe what I mean by technical. There is an official rating that uses a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is basically a mild dirt road and 5 requires the use of hands or ropes or ladders.
I think it should have a better unit of measure. I might default to ‘twisted ankles’. You know, we could rank it from 1 twisted ankle to 5 twisted ankles.
But that’s still pretty boring. How about bloody elbows? Or broken teeth?
Well on the 1-5 scale of copiously bleeding knees my trails around my house are mostly in the middle, let’s say 3 fracturde wrists out of 5.
Not awful, but not nothing.
These Drummer Hill trails I’d have to give 4-4.5 torn off toenails out of 5.
So, yeah, harder. I did use my hands on some of it.
I fell twice. My over-under was 3, so if you had the under you win. Luckily I sustained very little damage. Throw in a half-dozen toe stubs on the uphills where I was able to catch myself with my hands and it wasn’t even close. I think I was going so slow it didn’t hurt to fall.
But, back to the action, I rolled out of loop two and into the exchange, having shed all my overconfidence (and most of my confidence) and was feeling pretty beat up looking down the barrel of another 3+ hours of trudging.
I drank one of the KeytoneIQ shots I had brought. Just to see if it would clear the brain fog. I ate a couple more endurolytes and, since my dates had gone off on their own trail adventure, I took a bottle of Nuun with me from the cooler to carry with me on the third loop.
I managed my own water resupply by pouring a water bottle from my cooler into my pack.
I started back up the trail, but after a few steps, realized I had forgotten something. The ultra-running secret weapon. So I turned around.
It was time to call in the reserves.
I went to my bag and got my headphones and my phone and dialed up an endless stream of Grateful Dead.
Thusly well-equipped I turned into my own brain and back into the belly of the beast.
By this point, there weren’t many people left on the course. Occasionally someone would come in the other direction and we’d grunt something at each other..
I was like some weird one-eyed pirate lost in my own head.
But I was finally starting to figure the course topography out. It was shaped like a saddle. First you went up a big hill and then down into the aid station, then up again and finally down into the finish.
Repeat.
I stopped trying to race the uphills, stopped trying to fight the course, and settled into hiking where it was hard. Just sort of zoned out and moving.
My companion was a Dead show in Pasadena California from 1969. An outstanding Dark Star and Pigpen leading a nearly 30 minute long Love Light.
Let it shine, shine, shine. Let it shine.
Of course, the risk of premeditated Dead treatment in the trails on a long day manifested and I got lost. Right before the aid station I was running along lost in my head when I realized the rock bridge I was crossing didn’t look familiar and I hadn’t seen a course flag in a while.
Rut Row.
I gave it a few hundred more feet and turned around. Sure enough, the flags went left and I stayed right. In the trail running community we refer to this as ‘bonus mileage’. It wasn’t a course issue. The course was marked perfectly well and obvious.
I was just spacing out on auto pilot.
Coming into the 3rd transition to finish loop 3 and start loop 4, the last loop, I had thoughts about calling it a day. But put those aside and made the turn. This is that moment in every long race. It’s maybe why we do it. When we need to make a decision to continue. That’s life. Every day.
I decided to keep at it.
Frankly, after I stopped fighting the course and got a bottle of Nuun down, I felt pretty good.
And with that, the 4th loop felt good. Legs were fine. No cramps. Had another bottle of Nuun with me to sip and an excellent 12-minute Terrapin Station from 1981. I wasn’t racing or trying to attack anything. Just being groovy. I actually passed a couple people.
A couple tactical foot-care things cropped up. First was I picked up some small gravel in my shoes, but it wasn’t bad enough to warrant stopping to shake them out. I also had an issue with the silicon toe caps that I wear to keep from pulling the nail off my big toe. The downhill was so technical they worked off my toe and were scrunched up in the toe-box. But, it was more curious than bothersome at that point late in the race so I ran with them.
I did make another brief wrong turn at the start of the 4th lap, but corrected quickly and forced myself to pay attention at the intersections from that point on.
Early in the 4th lap my watch started complaining about a low battery. But I ignored it and it lasted well past the finish line.
Basically, once I got into the final loop it was fine. It was a Fait accomplie. The finish was never in doubt. I was just slow. Legs were fine. No cramping at all. Just slow.
I think I may have over-served myself on the electrolytes, because I did have some Adema swelling in my hands at the end, but it cleared up with 5-6 bottles of water.
All-in-all it was a successful outing and I learned a lot.
- I’m in decent shape and well trained.
- Was able to adapt in process to an unexpected course and not get thrown.
- Hill climbing requires a different muscle set, but a strong core is the ultimate multi-tool. .
- Needed more hiking practice.
- Needed more hyper-technical up and down training.
- Nutrition was fine.
- Core was good.
So that is it, my friends, Drummer Hill 50K in the can. Next up, in just about 30 days we jet out to Sacramento (where you know there will be a lot of Dead Heads) to help Eric get his buckle.