Wilderness Running Company

From the Whipple Trail, Pine Valley Wilderness, Dixie National Forest

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I ran the TRT 50K last weekend. It was a slightly strange, staccato few days. Every time the weekend felt like it was about to cohere, the flow was interrupted. In the end, it felt like several different events in one. So rather than try to tease out a narrative thread, I thought I’d simply rope off my jumble of thoughts, occurrences and impressions into broad categories. This approach turns out to be more or less chronological anyway.

The Good

By far, the best thing about the weekend was the chance to spend a bit of time with several of the ultrarunners I most like and admire. I wouldn’t have made the trip if that opportunity had not been there, and the fact that it was ensured the trip would be well worth the while. (It might also be worth noting that I”m using this forum today for a more conventional race report than is my habit in large part because I wasn’t able to sync up with my heroes nearly as much as I would have liked and want them to know what I was up to out there.)

The race itself is terrific. From the course to the organization to the people, I loved everything about it. If you’re already putting pencil to your 2011 race calendar and have a slot open for a beautiful, challenging, and rewarding 50K, 50M, or 100M in July, it would be hard to beat this one.

I came out of the weekend uninjured: no new injury and no aggravation of anything old. In fact, a few days later I feel better than I have at any time since the second before I wrecked my ankle two months ago. That is no small relief.

Mixing The Good With The Bad

Due to my injury streak, I had not put two “plus” weeks of training together back-to-back since April. The last half of June was particularly bad as I endured a very nasty relapse of the back trouble that ruined the first part of the year. As recently as two weeks before TRT, I was still getting very scary warning spasms whenever I hopped up or off a small obstacle, or caught a toe during short trail runs. A week before TRT, I took my body for one final test drive over a challenging, technical 3.5 hour run. I didn’t feel strong and my back felt pretty vulnerable at the end, but, overall, I felt far better than I thought I would even a week earlier. So, heading into TRT, I didn’t have much fitness but felt pretty sure I wasn’t being completely stupid about my back. Slow-and-mellow was my mantra.

With all this in mind, I made sure I was well toward the back of the line when we hit singletrack five or ten minutes into the run. That meant I hiked nearly the entire few-mile climb until the short descent to Marlette Lake. The pace through this section would usually have left me agitated, but an extra silky warmup was just right on this particular day. Then, from the time the route left singletrack at Marlette Lake until Tunnel Creek, I was able to find a pace that was still well within my mellow zone but a little less hiker-y. I felt really good and the view from Marlette Peak was even better than advertised. An added bonus at the end of this stretch was crossing paths with Gretchen as she was finishing her first Red House lap. That particular moment stands out as the one where I was most happy to be where I was, doing what I was doing.

My game plan for the Red House loop was to take it even easier. Reading reports by Gretchen and others left me with the impression that Red House is a section where flow goes to die, plus my back is put at most risk by steep hills — the stabilization required by going down and the full body effort required by going up. So that’s what I did and it went pretty much to plan: I did lose all sense of flow but didn’t burn many matches or tweak my back getting around the loop.

The next sub-goal, for the section from Tunnel Creek to Snow Valley Peak, was simply to stay fueled-and-hydrated and slow-and-mellow while trying to get back some rhythm. Within about a mile of leaving Tunnel Creek I began to feel pretty good, but on the descent down to the Hobart aid station, my back started to shoot sparks. I was already afraid of the long descent from Snow Valley to the finish and had resolved to drop at the first serious warning signals from my body rather than risk a setback that would cost me weeks … again. Based on what (little) I knew about the two aid stations, I calculated that Hobart was probably my last best chance to err on the side of being conservative. As it turns out, the volunteers acted perfectly when I told them my thinking: they weren’t going to berate me if I dropped but they weren’t going to make it easy either. I caught more good luck when the spasms gradually calmed down after laying flat on my back for awhile in the medical tent. So I decided to continue. The back spasms would eventually return, but without much intensity.

The Ugly

I gradually, progressively felt better on the climb from Hobart to Snow Valley Peak. My back remained fully cooperative and I had decent energy until about the last mile before the aid station. At that point, my stomach started to get seriously sour. This has been a recurrent theme for me in ultra-length events. And I mean every ultra-distant event, running or cycling. Sure, I’ve had plenty of bad days less than 5 hours long, but I can’t recall a single time I’ve gone over 5 hours that didn’t end with a sick stomach. The only question is how sick. I’ve tried a variety of ordinary and engineered foods, but without much luck. The discomfort and even the puking aren’t necessarily the end of the world. But the hard bonk and hours of post-event nausea and dizziness that are frequent accompaniments pretty much suck the fun out of an otherwise perfectly good suffer session.

Anyway, within a mile of starting the long downhill from Snow Valley Peak, the jostling turned my iffy stomach completely against me. I tried to move smoothly and quit consuming anything but water to try to let my stomach settle a bit. Nothing. The only things that helped, slightly, were to puke and to walk. So that’s what I did, the rest of the way in. And, yes, I mean both puking and walking. In fact, I stopped walking at the finish line but didn’t stop puking at semi-regular intervals for another seven hours.

Resting my psoas at the finishing tent.
The cup I’m holding came in mighty handy on the drive back to the hotel.
Photo: Donald (one of the three extra-welcome friendly faces at the finish)

All in all, I figure I lost around an hour and a half to my back and stomach on top of an already geared-down pace. The silver lining of having to go even slower than I thought I’d have to is the bit I mentioned earlier about my back, ankle and legs feeling better now than before the race. Was it a success? As a weekend, no doubt. As a run, I’m still not sure whether the lesson is that I need to be more systematic about solving the nutrition riddle or that I should accept what seems to be my natural “happy zone” of runs 2-4 hours long with a soft cap of about 5 hours.

On that note, a plea: seasoned ultrarunners who have run the nutrition gauntlet and eventually solved it, I’m begging you to comment with advice.

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With the return of the Tour de France to the high mountains, my thoughts have wandered back to a topic I occasionally ponder: why does the trail running scene take relatively little explicit account of body type? I mean, in cycling, no one expects even the the strongest strong man in the peloton to do anything but lose time, gobs of it, when the road points up in a sustained fashion. Why? Because he’s a Diesel not an Angel.

Let’s get a bit more concrete.

Intuitively, it seems like the dispositive factors in mountain running are essentially the same as cycling uphill, namely, power and weight. Cyclists at the top of the sport have a very good handle on their maximum explosive and sustained power, and what that means for going uphill at a given weight. With a relatively simple formula, they are able to predict with considerable accuracy how long it will take, say, a 70 kilo rider to complete a 500 meter climb at 250 watts. Shoot, it isn’t limited to top pros: in 2010 probably 90% of all self-respecting Cat 3s — the level of the “local hero” — are friendly with their holy grail metric, watts/kg. With these few figures, comparisons between different days and between different athletes, are pretty easy, with obvious implications for specialization of training, event selection, pacing, etc.

So sprinters like Cavendish or Farrar are the Usain Bolts of the peloton, able to generate incredible power in short bursts. Diesels like Cancellara can generate massive sustained power, but are penalized by their weight in the mountains (~80 kilos is a pretty common weight for a Diesel, whereas true climbers, or Angels, rarely exceed about 65kg; yep, easily a difference of 30+ lbs). I’m sure you can think of the trail running analog to the different types of cyclist. Killian Jornet = Alberto Contador, for instance.

So why isn’t similar methodology and specialization utilized in running? Is it simply that power is more easily and accurately measured in real time on a bike than on foot? Too unromantic? Just a matter of time? Something else?

While I’m at it, trail running also needs better nicknames for the heroes of the sport. For example, Il Falco (The Falcon) for Paolo Savoldelli, the best descender in the peloton a few years back, is simply awesome. The Alaskan Assassin is a start, I suppose.

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