digitaldiscipline ◾ ◾ fiddy. (if you round up)

Sunday, at the encouragement of friends and due to an astonishing lack of foresight, I did a thing.

Well, that's both true and misleading - I did a thing, but it was not the thing I had set out to do.

From the pre-race email: "4th Annual Palm Bluff Trail Race and Ultra Marathon. We are very excited for this years[sic] race. It looks like the weather will be good but hot for the race this weekend. The weather report currently says it will be sunny with a low of 68 and a high of 91."

I signed up to do the 50 mile event, but, midway through, the guys I'd signed up with and I recognized that we were slowing down too much to make the 13 hour cut-off, and scaled our expectations back to the 50km finish instead. Derek, the lead monkey in this circus, finished in 8:40; Jonathan crossed the line right around 11:00 even. I got myself a big fat disappointing DNF when I tapped out at Aid Station 2 on the last lap, which was, at a guess, based on what race staff said, about five miles from the finish line.

Things started out well, though I wish I'd gotten more sleep. The first lap began in the pre-dawn dark, with many folks carrying flashlights and whatnot (mine is apparently toast; I noticed it was dead, put in new batteries the day before, turned it on to make sure it worked... and it was dead when I tested it the next morning), but the sun came up about 30 minutes after the race began, and it was about as pleasant as it gets with a forecast like that one up there.

Before the start, I was apparently landed on by a dragonfly; according to the race director's wife, this is ostensibly good luck[1].

The hat was a loaner, and started out floppy, then went to soggy, and ended the day as a salt frisbee.

Here's how things looked going along the first lap, at approximately the one-and-a-half hour mark:

L-R: Yours truly, Derek in white, Jonathan in the festive beard, and a late starter named AJ who caught up to us and stayed with us, as the drogue group of the 50 mile event, until we gradually separated.

Beginning lap two (~9 miles in), with banana for scale.

At the end of the second lap, I'd already set a distance PR, and the sun was starting to kick my ass. We'd lost Jonathan to a long pit stop at the drop point at the end of the first lap (he had blisters, and was changing socks as well as refueling, but, as anyone who has done any kind of long endurance thing knows, stopping is hard, because getting restarted is harder, and there was a pace bogey to keep us moving). I took a slightly prolonged drop point visit at the end of the second loop to change into a lighter and dryer shirt, and then had to push my pace a little bit to catch back up to Derek to try to keep on target for the 50 mile finish.

This was about four and a half hours in, and was when the wheels comprehensively came off my day - not only did that pace push kick me down the metabolic slippery slope, my phone also freaked the fuck out and lost my time and distance tracking (and zorched all the supplies I'd collected in Zombies, Run! dammit.) Apparently, that looks like seven variations of this:

So, that was annoying.

And then the suck settled in. One of the guys who belongs to the training group had told us to smile and embrace the suck, but what he neglected to mention was how ardently the suck would embrace you back.

That looks like this:

As I noted in a conversation on the bookface, to

that_baker_guy...
TBG: You ran that sucker.
Me: "ran" - I walked probably 40% of the distance - the first two laps were 9 minutes of very slow jogging with a 1 minute walking recovery, pretty consistently, and then, after jogging about the first two miles of the third lap, my legs forgot how to, so it was a gradually-slowing walk for about what I'd estimate were the last ten miles. there was absolutely no zen on my part. other folks said they found theirs, but i mostly bounced among enjoying the conversation when there was anyone nearby (which got less and less frequent), worrying about being attacked by wildlife, being hungry, being thirsty, needing to relieve myself, and being hot and in increasing levels of physical discomfort. The closest thing i got to a mental holiday was getting earwormed by "thank god for the bus driver" for 45 minutes, which was as maddening as you can imagine it to be.

Near the end of the third lap, I was negotiating with myself the merits of trying to finish vs just walking to the finish line and calling whatever distance that was good. (Un?)fortunately, a mother/daughter pair doing the 50k caught up to me about a mile before the drop point where the course splits and played cheerleader, "You can do six more miles, right? It's only six miles..." and, for some reason, that seemed reasonable enough to get me to turn left after refilling my hydration vest and getting some snacks.

By the time I passed full marathon distance, I was flagging badly - 4.5km/hr walking pace and some sore goddamned feet, and I had to pee but couldn't sweat.

These selfies were taken about an hour apart, from approximately the point where I passed 26.2 to when I threw in the towel (older pic on the bottom, because twitter).

I hit the aid station where I packed it in, and I'd gone through an entire gallon of electrolyte fluid in the course of going from point 9 on the map to aid station two (about 5km, I guess), and asked the folks there about how far it was to the finish. Doing the math, I knew I didn't have it in me to keep doing that for two more hours under the hottest sun of the day (the heat index was apparently around 100F), so I stopped my watch (the fitbit, as noted, tracked the entire ordeal) just past the 500 minute mark, and gratefully drank some water, ate a brownie, and climbed slowly into the back seat of the RD's truck for the ride back to camp, where I alternately ate, drank, sweated, limped around, and stared kind of blandly at the rest of the endurance zombies.

Everyone at the event was nice, and helpful, and supportive. We spent some time on the trail with a woman named Jackie who is a semi-retired olympic lifting coach. there was a woman doing her 99th ultra as a tune-up for doing one in the florida keys for her 100th.

Which isn't to say that, as awful as the exertion was, the trail itself wasn't interesting and fairly pretty (except for a couple of long hauls beneath power lines, which were just the worst part of the day once the sun cleared the treeline - that's probably what being a microwave dinner feels like).

Jonathan, Jackie, and me, photographed by Derek at some point on the first lap.

The race support crew was wonderful - they were all friendly and cheerful and helpful, and the aid stations were so well stocked, my drop bag could have just been a change of shirts, instead of the 18,000 calories' worth of stuff I packed and enough clothes to cosplay as an athlete for a weekend.

Things that hurt during the race: my calves, and my hips when I ran. the fronts of my ankles. a large blister that formed on my right baby toe, which I didn't notice as anything other than painfully tender until I took my socks off when i got back to my house at 10pm[2]. two small patches of mild sunburn just above my elbows. my pride, such as it is.

I'm pretty confident that is the worst thing I've ever done, physically and psychologically. I wasn't reduced to the involuntary pain and exertion noises of walking with a 135# barbell on my shoulders for a kilometer, but at least that was over in about 20 minutes.

[1] The RD and his wife were dropping off fresh provisions to their daughters, who were staffing Aid Station #2 when I trudged up, so I didn't have to wait for a ride back. That represented the high point of my good fortune for the day.
[2] GI issues finally showed up once I stopped moving and got in the car, I nearly forgot/lost my cell phone at a highway rest stop, and there was a semi on fire that caused a 45 minute, ten-mile delay on my drive home from D's house, where his family had hosted us - they're lovely folks with friendly dogs and a cat that was seen, albeit briefly.