A Fun Day at Fundy – June 2013

A Fun Day at Fundy – June 2013

The Bay of Fundy Marathon.

There’s this joke that some of the folks in my running club tell.  These are the old timers who have run with me or trained with me.  They tell stories of how I’d take a group out on a 3-5 mile fun run in the trails and somehow I would get lost and it would always seem to turn into 2+hour sufferfest.

There I would be with my dog, smiling and chatting away, oblivious to the fact that other people might not be enjoying the extra miles as much as I was.  My friend Anthony who taught me how to ride a mountain bike and his wife Leanne made up a name for it.  They’d listen to the complaints, smile a knowing smile, and say “You got Russell-ed”.

I can’t help it.  I love to run.  I love to throw myself at a worthy long run or race and make it beat me.  I am never happier than when a race or a run kicks my ass.

The Bay of Fundy Marathon kicked my ass.  It whispered sweet nothings in my ear like cunning blind date.  It lied to me and then celebrated my naiveté with a good old fashioned hard marathon. My kind of race. Beautiful and cruel.

…

It seemed like a good plan.  After missing my qualifying time by 4 minutes at the beautiful but tough Vt. Shires Marathon I was confident that I just needed more ‘at-bats’ to make up those 4 minutes.  Never one to plan too far ahead, I surfed MarathonGuide.com to see if there were any other drivable marathons around that I could jump into to take another try.

The Bay of Fundy Marathon looked like a good choice.  It was about a 6 hour drive, the course map looked challenging but not overwhelming, I would pick up Maine as another state on my 50 states list and, based on my performance in Vermont, I figured with another solid training cycle I should be able to qualify.

My training had been going well and I was feeling strong and light after the Shires race, so why not strike while the iron is hot?

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In the 70’s when I was a kid, maybe 10 years old, my parents decided it would be a great idea to pack us 4 kids into the car and do a driving vacation of Maine and Eastern Canada.  This is why we Americans think the original Vacation movie with Chevy Chase is so funny because we have lived some version of it ourselves.

I don’t remember much about that trip other than the six of us having to sleep in my folks’ Renault station wagon somewhere in Quebec when we couldn’t find a motel room.  I do remember the Bay of Fundy.  I have this loop of Super-8 film in my head of the disappointing dirty little wave rolling up the bay as the tide came in.

…

As I parked in Lubec Maine, and walked towards Canadian Border Control to check in for the race, I was on that same bridge from which I remembered that Super-8 perspective.  This was a first year race that ran from Maine, across the bridge into Canada, perambulated an out and back on Campobello Island to finish back across the border in Maine.

Since we would be running across the border a couple times all the runners had to check in at Canadian Border Control where they gave us our bib numbers and logged us in.  During the race there was a timing mat on the border with border agents matching the numbers against the list of people who had checked in.

To make the check in requirements I had to leave my house early on Saturday.  I picked up a rental car at 9:00 AM and drove the 6 hours north and east to the easternmost point in the USA.  It was uneventful and I got to catch up on some running podcasts.

Because I like my racing cheap and easy I got a Toyota Corolla for free on a credit for Enterprise having screwed up a previous rental and packed it up with my camping gear and a cooler with my race bottles, some fruit and other food.  The entire trip, besides the race fee would cost me $60 in gas and $28 Canadian for the campsite.  Yes I’m compulsive and cheap.

…

When I was checking in I got an impossible-to-hear phone call from Aaron, a guy from my club, who I didn’t know that well, who was also running the race.  Where we were was the edge of cell phone coverage, but I discerned that he was just behind me on his way to check in and I waited for him at the tourist center.

He wanted to go to the pre-race pasta dinner, but I’m not a big fan of those.  It just seems like a waste of time and energy to go wait in line in a school cafeteria for poorly cooked spaghetti.  I demurred and told him I’d meet him at the start in the morning.

I had told him that I was trying to run a 3:30 marathon.  He had decided that since that was a slow pace for him, he believed himself more in the 3:15 range, but he was currently fighting some niggles, he’d pace me.  Fine with me, I’m always happy for company.

Then I drove the course and realized that I had been duped by this pretty, cruel race.  The course was all hills.  Big hills, little hills, shallow hills, steep hills – the whole thing was hills.  My heart sank a little as I realized this was not a BQ course for me on my current fitness and training.

It hadn’t looked that bad on the website.  What happened?  On the website the course map was linked to an elevation map on MapMyRun.com.  When I looked at it there appeared to be 2 reasonable sized hills that you’d have to run twice, once on the way out and once on the way back.  Each of these hills seemed to be less than 200 ft of elevation gain – so around 800 feet total for the race, which is really nothing. I knew I hadn’t been specifically training for hills but thought I could manage to survive a couple and race the rest of the course.

Apparently, what happened was that when the elevation profile was scaled to fit all 26.2 miles onto the screen the prolific elevation gains and losses were masked.  What looked like one hill was really a series of 5 or 6 shorter hills that didn’t scale on the profile.  When I uploaded my Garmin data it would report I had trekked over 3,000 feet of elevation gain.

…

Now I was checking into my humble camp site on Campobello Island wondering what to do?  But, I already knew what I would do.  I would take my current fitness and race the race.  Marathons can hold hidden miracles and you never know.

I checked into the campsite and drove back out to where I could pick up some cell phone reception. I sent a text to Aaron telling him about the course.  I sent a text to my family, checking in.  I went back to the campsite and set up my tent.  I went for a long walk around the camp at Herring Cove Provincial Park.

I had brought an air mattress with me but had forgotten a pump, so I patiently lay in my tent exhaling great plumes of air from my runner’s lungs into the vinyl bladder.  I thought maybe this was part of my training, part of my Karma.  I rolled out my sleeping bag and was treated to the comforting smell of dog-butt.  Apparently the dog had been the last one to use this bag and someone had rolled it up and put it away without cleaning it.  Buddy was with me not only in spirit but vapors.

There were a couple scattered campers but the place was 80% empty.  I visited the restaurant at the golf course for a sandwich.  I went down and gazed at the empty ½ mile of black sand beach where the crème de le crème of the East Coast moneyed class spent their summers in Victorian times.

They had the most interesting looking local IPA at the restaurant but it was a big pint bottle and 6.5% alcohol so I had to take a pass with a marathon less than 12 hours away on a hilly course.

I was worried about getting up in the morning.  The Canadian side was in a different time zone than the US side and my iPhone battery was draining from fruitlessly searching for a network.  The campsite had a power outlet on a post so I ran an extension cord into the tent and plugged in my laptop and connected my iPhone to the USB.  I crawled into my stinky sleeping bag, spat out some dog hair and read a little in the dwindling twilight.

It was the summer solstice and the longest day of the year.  I was very far north and east.  Add to this the rising of the biggest moon of the year and it never really got dark in my tent.  It didn’t matter.  I slept great.

I needn’t have worried about the alarm, because I was up with the sun.  I had tactically prepared a small container of my usual oatmeal with fresh blueberries, raw almonds and honey and ate it cold with a venti Starbucks coffee, also cold, that I had procured the day before.  A man can’t race without coffee and fuel.

I packed up my camp. I was back across the border and parked at the school in time for the first bus to the start.  It was full of the sunshine start crowd.  These were walkers and slower runners or anyone who just wanted extra time on the course.  There were the marathon maniacs and 50-staters.

I really like these people.  They are so low-stress.  They run marathons, exploring the world one race at a time.  They know what they are doing and are low maintenance racers.  Most of them are older and this is their thing that they are doing in their retirement instead of driving a Winnebago to Yellowstone.

The busses dropped us off at a lighthouse and I got to see the sunshine start.  The race director, John, was an Aussie and reminded alot of Kevin Molloy, another Aussie, who started both my running club and the Groton Road Race.

It was a beautiful day, in a beautiful place with the bright morning sun and the Atlantic Ocean.  John lined the sunshine start folks up and apologized that while he had a Canadian for the Canadian anthem, his American anthem singer had not shown up.  Then a woman, one of the racers, maybe in her 60’s stepped out of the gathered runners and volunteered.

I don’t know if it was my sleep deprivation or being in such a beautiful place on such a beautiful day but both Anthems brought tears to my eyes as I reflected on how lucky I was and how great it was to be here, now, at this place.

After they had left I had the starting area all to myself with a handful of other runners.  I did my routine of stretching and fueling and rubbing and taping and greasing.  I talked to a gentleman from St. Louis who was on TV at Boston, one of the last to finish.  He was the guy in front of the older gentleman who got knocked down by the first blast.

As the later buses began to roll in with their crops of nervous amateur athletes I met up with Aaron.  Aaron is a chatty guy.  I told him about the course and that I was racing anyhow.  He was fine with that and promised to do his best to keep me from going out too fast.

At 8:00 Am we stood through another rendition of anthems and were off.  From the start Aaron was troubled with my approach. I told him I liked to burn off a little adrenaline early and put a couple minutes in the bank.  He kept telling me I was running too fast and I’d respond by telling him I had seen the course and we would need all the time we could bank.

After a few miles at an average pace in the 7:30’s we climbed the bridge over the mud flats with their heavy, dank, organic ocean smells.  The weather was perfect.  No warmer than 60 degrees, with a slight ocean breeze.  I was cooler than I had been at Vermont and wasn’t sweating as much.  Then the hills started and we got to work.  The first couple hills we managed to push through, still averaging sub-8’s.

I was sipping my Gatorade handheld and barely taking anything from the water stops.  We had 3 minutes in the bank going into the half marathon, but it was starting to get hard.  On a particularly steep hill around mile 14 I decided to walk and not push through to save my legs.  Shortly after cresting that hill I turned to Aaron and said, “I think I’m going to have to pull the plug on this one.” I meant I didn’t think I could hold race pace on the hills.

But on the following downhills I felt strong so I made a reversed decision to push.  I stopped looking at my watch and decided to walk-run the uphills and push the pace on the downhills.  I made myself a deal that If I still had any time in the bank at mile 20 I’d go for broke, if not I’d back off and fun-run it to the finish.

Aaron, caught by surprise by me saying one thing and doing the opposite let me go.  I raced on alone to the headlands and the turnaround. .  It was particularly disheartening to know that all those same hills we had pushed through on the way out, we had to push back through on the way back.  I passed the runners behind me and saw many of them walking and grim.

My effort level was good and I was working hard.  I threw away my bottle and sunglasses and got to work.  But I was walking too much and my downhill pushes weren’t enough to make up the difference.  I knew the 20 mile mark was coming up.

The mile marks were painted on sandwich boards by the side of the road.  I saw one coming that had 20 written on it and checked my watch.  By some miracle, if my math could be trusted I still had 2:30 in the bank.  While I was trying to figure out how this could be possible and prematurely celebrating my victory, I realized that this was the 20K marker on the other side of the road that through some cruel twist of course planning was within a ½ mile of the 20 mile mark on my side of the road.

When the correct marker finally came into view I was more than 2 minutes in the red.  Checking my systems I was ok for finishing the race but there was no way I was going to make up 2-3 minutes in the last 10k with 2-3 more big hills to come.  I backed off and walk-jogged the rest.  I didn’t bonk, but my legs were fairly beat up from the hills.  It took until Thursday for the soreness in my quads to go away.

The last ¾ mile into the finish is a super smooth downhill with only the short rise of the bridge to slow your progress.  The finish is right on Main Street in Lubec, one of those postcard Maine villages right up against the bay.

I wheeled back through customs in a good mood now that I didn’t have to worry about race times.  I joked with the border guards that I was smuggling lobsters in my shorts.  I ended up just over a 3:44, so a not so special 17 minute positive split that earned me 65^th place out of 488.

The medal was a locally made cast of a scallop shell which was a nice touch.  It matched the lobster-pot bait bag that they gave us our packets in.  Nice touches. I saw John, the race director at the finish, shook his hand and thanked him for a good first year event.

These are exactly the kind of races I love.  Lord save me from a 50,000 person city race.  Give me the open road in a beautiful unknown corner of the world with a couple hundred like minded lunatics.  That’s the race for me.

Aaron rolled through 15 minutes later.  I had been expecting him to pass me late in the race based on his big talk, but my fast start and the hills caused his hamstring to lock up.  He got Russell-ed. I gave him 3 Enduralytes for the cramping as we limped back to the school to get our cars.

Am I happy with the race?  Yes, I am.  I ran strong, but I wasn’t trained or fit enough to race a time on that course.  The 6 weeks since Vermont had not gone as well as I hoped.  My body began to show the familiar signs of over-training and breakdown.  The Stanley Cup finals and my work schedule kept me from getting enough sleep.

After that last unfortunate 20 miler in the heat I hadn’t felt quite right.  I had to cut back on my training to avoid my heel pain flaring up again.  I felt overly tired and other parts were achy as well.  I’m quite OK with running a strong race on a hard course with my body not at 100% and walking away from it.

I still need to get some base fitness training.  My speed and mechanics are good.  I was dropping comfortable 7:30’s on the flats and downs and my mechanics were the best they’ve been since the injury.  I need to slow it down.  I need to do some heart rate and form training.  Build my fitness at the cellular level.  Get my hill legs back.  Get some muscle mass back on my legs.

At the same time I need to keep working on cleaning up my diet.  Dragging fat around with me doesn’t help me race.  I need to get clean fuel.  Not just to lose weight but to be fit and lean. I’ve never been very lean, but tomorrow’s another day and I can decide to do it if I choose to.

I would recommend the Fundy Marathon.  They did a great job for a first year race.  Everyone was super-friendly.  It’s a stunningly beautiful place.  If you go, take the weekend and make a tour out of it.