Saturday, June 11, 2011
Crazy as it sounds, I am reluctant to go to sleep tonight because then today, Friday still for me, will be completely over. I suppose now that I have showered and brushed my teeth and hair, it already has ended, and nothing is left but a grumpy intestinal tract, a sunburned face, some sore quadriceps muscles, and a renewed passion for running so strong that it makes me want to cry to think about it.
To be completely honest, I wasn’t sure if this weekend was going to be a good thing or not. In particular, I didn’t know what my foot was going to do, and it seemed to me that that had the potential to ruin the whole thing for me. I have just had enough with injury and inability and being the weak link. It feels awful. And I’ve been a bit disconnected from the running group for a while, so although I am friends with everyone who was going to be in my van, I was feeling cautious about that as well.
Fortunately, as soon as I woke up on Friday morning, well before 6am, I was excited. I was excited just to be going somewhere and to maybe be running, although still pretty nervous about the foot. Mary picked me up a bit after 7am, and we met the rest of the team and all trooped up to Wisconsin. We made a gas/Wendy’s stop, a grocery stop, and a chai stop (for me.) I started to feel like things were going to be OK one way or another.
We arrived at the park in Madison before noon and decorated the vans. We hung around a bit and attended the mandatory safety meeting. Then I hurried back to the car to change out of my jeans and team shirt and into running clothes. I had been watching the weather prediction obsessively. It seemed very likely that we were going to get rained on constantly, and the temperature was supposed to be quite chilly. But in spite of predictions, the weather was perhaps 60 and overcast before my first run. I put on a tank top and shorts with a long-sleeve over for before the start line and went back to find my team. I had only a few minutes for pictures and race numbers and last instructions before the 1pm teams were told to line up. There were maybe 20 or so teams in our group. The MC read off the team names. Of course when he read off “Fox River Trail Runners,” I got the loudest cheers. Both vans were there to see the start. As the MC announced that we were seconds away from starting a 197 mile race, I could not help but smile. How incredibly cool. I was at the beginning of a challenge and an adventure.
Still nervous about my foot, I started out at the back of the pack. Honestly, since I am still not up to my normal running mileage and speed, I was worried that I was just going to be left in the dust. For a few minutes I was left behind, but then I passed a few people and found my rhythm. It is rarely smart to abandon all self-control and common sense at the beginning of a long race, and I was testing out my foot as well. I talked to a guy briefly who said he had just been recruited to his team the day before and that in running the nine-minute pace we were at, he was going way faster than he had promised his teammates. I picked the pace up and he slowed down, and I probably never saw him or his team again.
My run started out around Lake Monona in downtown Madison. It was lovely to be running, and although my foot was a bit uncomfortable, and I was still anxious about what that meant for the overall race, I was happy to be running along the water and through the city. I felt myself beginning to relax into the run. My foot did hurt, but not more than usual, and I accepted that it was going to do what it was going to do. Too late to back out. At the very least, I was going to do this first run and enjoy it.
My team passed me in the van and honked and yelled and then had to stop at a stop-light. I ran past them. Then they passed me again. Then I was held up by some traffic in the busy downtown. It was not a closed course, so I did have to stop at intersections and wait for the lights to change, which was a very odd experience during a race. I followed the signs, or so I thought, and since we were still only a few miles from the starting line, I could follow the runners in front of me. Because I had had to hurry back to the van to change, I had been told that I missed an announcement about a detour in leg one. I figured it would be marked or that the people ahead of me would know what to do. We ran down a street that was all torn up. Strange, I thought, that they would detour us into construction. In spite of the construction, however, and the frequent need to stop or slow at intersections, I enjoyed the urban neighborhood I was running through. There were co-ops and bead stores and markets and older but not fancy homes that looked very down-to-earth and like they housed my kind of people.
Eventually, though, it did seem like we had been running through construction for a long time, probably a couple of miles, and the three people ahead of me all slowed and stopped at an intersection. “Are we lost?” I asked. The two women and one man who had once been ahead of me said that we probably were. None of us had maps or cell phones. None of us had memorized the street names on our route. “Well,” I said, “I know that we pretty much follow the lake the whole time, and our exchange is by the lake, so we could head toward the lake.” We did so, and after a couple of blocks-worth of running, we saw a guy with an orange flag. Ragnar gives every van a couple of safety flags (for a $15 deposit) and demands that every non-runner use one when crossing a street. We had made fun of this over-the-top safety precaution, but they actually came in very handy in this case because someone used their team flag to point us in the right direction. Within a block or two we saw more Ragnar directional signs and finished without further confusion.
Although I am sorry that I probably missed some non-construction scenery, I am, in retrospect, grateful for the course confusion. Once I turned my attention from my foot to my possible lostness, and then to the people with/against whom I was running, I allowed myself to really race. I picked up the pace a bit to pass two of the people with whom I had become lost. Both were ultra runners, meaning they were ultimately going to be running twice as much as I was, but they did not just have foot surgery either, so it was a valid victory. They were very fit runners, and I was definitely picking up the pace. A third woman stayed out ahead of me and gave me something to chase down. I finished my run feeling stronger and faster than I began it.
My team’s uniform was a brightly colored orange and yellow tie-dyed shirt, and I saw a few in the distance as I approached the exchange. Then I saw Brian moving away from the exchange. I was really glad that both vans had come to see the first hand-off but was a little disappointed that they were going to miss the actual hand-off. Why not wait two more minutes? Then I saw Dan, the person to whom I was handing off, sprinting toward the exchange area almost as hard as I was, apparently quite recently alerted to my approach. I slapped the bracelet on his arm without hitch.
At the next couple of exchanges, I was good to my foot, sitting and icing more than is generally my inclination, but I really wanted to run on it again, so it seemed worth it. The second van stayed with us for a couple of exchanges, and Mary and Max (captain and two-year-old) stayed with us for several. I spent an exchange or two trying to find out about a friend who had been in surgery all day, but once I heard that he had come through, it was easier to hang around with my teammates and chat. At one exchange in a small town in Wisconsin where someone had driven their riding lawnmower to the gas station and pulled it up to the pump, I went into the gas station to buy ice for our cooler. The guy in front of me at the counter, possibly the owner of the lawn mower, was asking the employees what all the commotion was about. The one handling the money said, “It’s some relay from Madison to Wisconsin.” When the guy with the checkbook said, “Yeah, but why?” She answered him, “I don’t know. I can’t figure that part out.” They turned around and looked at me. Seeing it from their perspective, it was a good question. “We’re doing it because we love to run, and it’s what we do for fun,” I told them. They shrugged and didn’t appear completely satisfied with my answer. It is, I must admit, something that a non-runner could probably never understand.
When Ryan, our sixth runner was out on the course, we met up with the other van again. They had stopped for a meal (we hadn’t had lunch—except for my Starbucks wrap and some food from the van) and attended the orientation for van two. The exchange from van to van was fun. We felt more like a team than I had thought we might.
When all of our runners were in, we had a couple hours off, so we went to downtown Lake Mills to Carp’s Landing and had what was, by then, dinner. That was a bizarre treat: to sit down to a nice meal with your team in the middle of a race. It had the effect, as most shared meals do, of making us feel like family, like we belonged together. We were a very agreeable mix of personalities with no sore thumbs and no one being rude or rubbing anyone else the wrong way.
After dinner, we went to the next van-to-van exchange where I would be picking up the baton. The number of vans there was astonishing! Hundreds of vans with hundreds and hundreds of runners! By then we had caught up with earlier waves of people. I saw a pair of women I know slightly, and they had started hours before we did. We had been on the road for over 13 hours by then, but since each of us had actually only run once, it seemed a bit odd that we were feeling tired. Perhaps it was because we knew what lay ahead. Both dusk and a light rain were falling when we arrived at exchange 13, and it was getting chilly as well. We decided to hunker down in the van to rest until we received word that the last runner from van two was on his way. I did not fall asleep, but we all lay there in the dark piled on top of each other perfectly silently and motionlessly lest we wake each other. My foot ached a bit, and my hip started to get sore from being curled up and bearing all my weight, but the silence and stillness seemed too sacred to disturb until it was absolutely necessary to do so.
It was full night and still raining and chilly when it was my turn to run again around 10pm. Ragnar demanded that all night-time runners wear a reflective vest, head-lamp, and tail-light for safety purposes. In addition to those precautions, I was asked to take a cell phone on my leg as it was going to be on a trail and I would have no contact with my van along the route. I wore a billed cap both for the rain and for the purpose of supporting the headlamp, and it worked fairly well. I had a pocket that attached to my race number belt for my cell phone. I also carried a small flashlight.
The exchange was in a large wide-open park near Waukesha, WI. The previous runners were coming out of the thick foggy darkness, and we could not see any features beyond their headlamps until they were actually in the exchange, so a few hundred yards out, a race volunteer would shout out the number of the team coming in. Todd came in at full speed, put the bracelet on my wrist, and I set off into the darkness as well. Immediately my tail light fell off, and I turned back to retrieve it.
I had to run on a street for a short bit and then turn into a parking lot and thence onto the trail. The runner ahead of me missed the turn. I tried to call to him/her but I do not know if he/she heard. The only person who responded was the guy behind me. “Are you going the right way?” he demanded, not very kindly. “I believe so!” I said, and flashed my light onto the sign right in front of us.
Once we gained the trail, the grumpy guy still right behind me, we were completely alone in the absolute darkness of a foggy, drizzling night. The path, as it turned out, was a paved one, and a fairly smooth one at that. The foliage was thick and glistening with rain on both sides of the trail, and it smelled green and lush and clean. It was late at night, and I was out running on a dark trail through lush verdure in the rain. I took a deep breath and smiled all the way down to my belly, perfectly happy. I was pushing my legs and my core pretty hard, but my soul was relaxed and free and about as blissful as it has been in these many long months of injury. I said to the guy maybe 20 feet behind me, “Isn’t this glorious?” He didn’t respond, but the vibes coming off him were not adequately joyful, so I left him in my dust, or more accurately my puddles. I pushed just a little harder, and after a while I could no longer hear his footfalls. I was a solitary runner in the deep night.
My second run was 4.3 miles, and for almost all of it, I was completely alone in the thick, dark silence of the trail. The mist danced ahead of me in my headlamp in bright silver sparks, and I heard only the rattle of my jostling taillight, my own footfalls, and the wind in my ears as I flew down the trail. I was working hard, but I was at complete peace. I could see no civilization, no light, no stars even, but I felt completely at home, as though I was at the single best spot in the planet, and I was the one privileged to be there. I could hear and feel myself working hard, pushing against the ground faster than I’ve run in months, but I was also airborne. That run alone was worth the surgery and ensuing recovery. It was worth every sucky careful run I’ve had in the process of getting back into shape. That run was a perfect embodiment of why I run. I felt my most joyful me. It was even, dare I say it, a reason to live here on this planet at all.
Eventually, in the distance, I saw blinking red lights. They turned out to be at the promised water station. I did not need sustenance beyond the sheer pleasure of running, but I thanked the volunteer for being there in the middle of the wet night for us runners. He told me cheerfully that I had one mile to go, which left me with a strange dilemma. A glance at my watch told me that if he was right, I was running surprisingly well, and I felt like I could certainly maintain the pace. But that would mean less than eight minutes more of the perfect run. Slowing and prolonging it, on the other hand, would mar its perfection. I dug in to hold on for another mile, to give my full self to the joy of running.
Just past the water station, a bit ahead of me was figure in a reflective vest with a flashlight swinging from side to side. The person was moving so slowly that I assumed at first that it was a volunteer looking for cups discarded after the water station. As I approached, however, I saw that it was a fellow female runner, just a different level of runner. I do not like to be passed, and I was not passed the entire relay, but I also am aware that by zipping past a much slower runner, I may have a demoralizing affect, so I like to offer encouragement instead. For this one I said, “Woo hoo!” as I passed her. She jumped and made a startled noise. “Oh, I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said, “I meant to cheer you on!” She laughed and thanked me, and all was mended.
I emerged from the trail and the woods and exchanged the bracelet in a wet, open field. I was sad to end the perfect run, the perfect half hour, but I was also decidedly euphoric. Running was back. I was a runner again. I was home. I was in love.
Pleasantly, during the course of my run the rain had diminished from drizzle to mist to tangible fog. The rest of my team ran their night-time legs, ending at about 1am at a large high school where the other van had been resting for an hour or two. We debated resting there as well, but ultimately we decided to drive ahead to the next van-to-van exchange site so that we would certainly be ready to run when it was our turn again.
I think I actually did doze off for a few minutes while the van was being driven by someone else. By the time we blearily grabbed our pillows and sleeping bags and made our way from the van parking area to the church that was offering a place to rest. Four of us stumbled into a dark room with room for four more and unrolled our bags. I went off to find a bathroom; all had very long lines. By the time I was able to lie down, it was 2:30 am.
It felt wonderful to stretch out flat in the dark, but although I was content and relaxed, I did not fall asleep. My phone made a sound—a text from a teammate. I tried my back and my stomach and could not fall asleep. A bit before 3am a phone call informed me that I should be ready run again around 4am. I had set my alarm for 3:20, figuring that would give me adequate time to get back to the van and put in my contacts, maybe eat a bit, and get back to the exchange site in front of the church. I found, however, that I was not going to be able to sleep for those last twenty minutes either. I had to pee, and I was hungry, so I crept out of the room and again stood in the bathroom line, which was still very long.
No one was talking in line. It was 3am and we were runners in line for a bathroom. When else do you have such fodder for small talk? I asked the women around me when they had started running. The one ahead of me in line had started at 8am, and when my eyebrows lifted in amazement, the woman behind me said she had started at 6am. “Wow!” I breathed. I must have been not entirely awake, because before I thought about it, I said, “Well that’s good! You must be about done….” And then I realized that of course they were not any more done than I was. They were still outside Racine and had to run to Chicago. Oops. Swallowing foot…. Of course, then they asked me when I had started. When I guiltily admitted that we had started at 1pm, the one woman said to the other, once a complete stranger and now a comrade in endurance running, “Oh, she must be one of those elite runners.” I do not usually think of myself that way, but put into the perspective they had provided I thought that yes, we probably had been allowed to start at 1pm because we were going to finish on time even with a late start. “Well the people in my van are all good runners,” I said. “We can generally average paces somewhere between 7 and 8, but the people in the other van are really really fast.” To comfort them, I added, “But that means that we don’t really get to sleep.”
“How long is it going to take your team to finish?” asked one of the women, in awe.
“Well, we were shooting for around 24 hours,” I answered her.
Both women looked impressed. One was hoping to finish mid to late afternoon. The other one was hoping to finish around 7pm. She said the course closed at 9pm. 37 hours out on the course!! Wow.
Leg 25 was mine, and it happened at 4:05am. Save for a brief doze in the van on the way to the exchange, I had been awake for about 23 hours. I hadn’t had a meal since 6pm the previous day. So my insides were a little confused by the experience. Luckily, the porta-potties outside the church had no line and I was able to frequent them. I wished I had known about them before standing in line inside. The conversation might have been worth it, but just flushing was not. I was well beyond niceties by then. I had a bite of Clif bar and a vanilla gu with caffeine and just hoped for the best. My right quadricep was also starting to twinge a bit. My foot felt no worse than it did on the first run, so I considered myself, overall, ready to go. My previous run had been such a soul-lifting experience, that, honestly, I would rather have been running than sleeping at four in the morning anyway. The weather was still hovering between precipitation and just heavy fog, but the air felt a little warmer to me and I decided on a short sleeve shirt and shorts. I had tights and a long-sleeve at the ready, but I decided that if I got cold, I’d just run harder.
As before, my team number was called out before I could actually see Todd. A man was running toward me, and I stood so that he would run right into me. My team shouted, though, “This is not him!” That guy gave his bracelet to someone else, and I stood at the ready. When Todd actually ran up, he put the bracelet on me and I ran off down the street.
The venue of my third run was not nearly as spectacular as the previous run. I was running down what would have been a moderately busy street at any other time of day. Even at 4am there were a surprising number of cars. Most of the run was on the side of the street. Toward the end a sidewalk became available. As before, I was able to both push and relax into the run. So often when I am racing I hear other runners around me, particularly at the beginning before we’ve all spread out and grouped ourselves by ability level, complaining about the heat or the cold or the damp or the early hour. In a long-distance relay, you almost never get to run with someone for long enough to have a conversation, but all of the people I passed on my third run looked far less happy to be there than I was. For one thing, I reminded myself, they were much slower than I was and probably didn’t have the kind of speedy team I had, so they had been on the road a lot longer than I had. And the scanty 3.8 miles we had to cover on our leg would probably take them longer than it would take me as well. Add to that, then, that some skinny woman was zooming past them, and yeah, I had some advantages in the spirit department. But as with any other race, the thought most prominent in my mind was gratitude and joy that I could be out running instead of doing anything else. The question from the gas station earlier that day, or, excuse me, technically the day before, crossed my mind. Why would you run from Madison to Chicago through a day and a night and a day if not for the joy of doing it? What else would I rather be doing? Whenever I passed someone I would look at my watch and try to estimate how much longer we had to go. When I passed someone who looked like they were really suffering through their run, I would tell them they were doing a good job and how much further we had to go. It wasn’t until the end of my run that I passed a couple of women who were closer to my pace.
My team likes to keep track of how many people we pass during the relay and tally them on the side of our van under the heading “road kill.” This earned us some disgusted looks when we drove back into Geneva with the markings still on the van. I assume the older man who looked appalled probably thought we had intentionally been running over small animals. I passed ten people on my third leg, most of them probably from starting waves many hours before ours.
About half-way through my run, the birds started to sing. We were still an hour before sunrise, but I managed to be out running at the mysterious moment when birds decided it is close enough to morning to start making noise.
My favorite moment of my last run, however, was near the end, when suddenly the course dipped down and turned right, and suddenly I was running along Lake Michigan. We had run half-way across Wisconsin. I knew that was going to happen, of course, but it was still surprising when I realized it was there. Had I been running in the daylight, I’m sure I would have seen the lake before I was right next to it, but in the darkness and the fog, I could not see it even when I could hear the waves on the shore quite clearly.
I didn’t have much time with the lake, and I spent it trying to pick off some runners who were actually running. I finished on as much of a high as I had begun, and when I met up with my team, minus Dan, who was running, and they asked if it felt good to be done, I told them that I was sad to be done, and that I would take someone else’s last leg if they wanted. I was mostly kidding, of course, since the original plan had been for someone else to take my last leg if my foot was not doing well. Ryan called me out on it, though. “Really?” he said. “I have eight miles of goodness.” OK, so maybe not. Probably not a good idea for my foot, my quad muscles, or my tummy. Maybe next time.
After our van was done running, we went to the exchanges for the other van to cheer them on as well. We joked that we should have kept track not only of roadkill but also of u-turns, as we saw that another team had done. At one point we were lost for so long that when we arrived at the exchange site, we thought we must have missed seeing Javier come in. We called the other van, but no one answered. We looked at the crowd around the exchange but saw no one. Then I said, “Wait, is that him?”
“No…yes!” said Ryan. “I think that is him.”
“We have to get out of the van!!” Chuck, Ryan and I screamed, but we were clearly not going to make it out in time. So we yelled as loud as we could and beat on the windows of the van, hoping our team would notice us as they exchanged right in front of us. The sudden screaming and banging woke up Dan and Dawn, both of whom had been asleep for the last couple of hours and had no idea where we were or who was running.
We were all starting to get a little weary and loopy by the end, and driving through traffic from Evanston to Montrose harbor for the end of the race was tricky. Thanks to some uninhibited driving, we pulled into the parking lot about the time we expected Todd to be arriving. We all piled out while Dan went to find a parking place. We hustled over to the course and waited for Todd about 30 meters from the finish line, which was on the beach. Within minutes, Todd appeared. The rest of our team appeared as well, and we all put on one last bit of speed to run Todd in as a group (minus the people trying to park,) wearing our yellow and orange tie-dyed shirts. What a complete blast from start to finish!
We ended up finishing well under 24hours, in spite of some initial skepticism. When we were walking back to the van to get some things we needed but had abandoned in our rush to see the finish, I was reminded that I was one of the worst skeptics. To be fair to my team, it was my part in the projected finish that was in question for me. I thought I could very well single-handedly bring our time down enough to make us miss the ambitious goal. I knew that no one would say anything to me about it. They probably wouldn’t even think uncharitable thoughts about me silently in their heads. They are kind people. But I was dreading letting them down. I was hoping they wouldn’t come away from the weekend wishing someone else had been invited on the team rather than me. I ended the experience pleased not only that we had, in fact, finished in less than 24 hours, but also pleased that while my pace was not what it maybe could be in peak injury-free fitness, I still was able to give it my best shot and had some pretty respectable runs. I felt like I was a runner again, like I belonged among runners, belonged on that team of runners. The time didn’t matter much beyond the indication that I could, finally, return to running, that I can maybe starting putting some races on the calendar.
And speaking of putting races on the calendar, as we were approaching the end of our journey, we all agreed that we would certainly be up for another such relay again in the future. Maybe another Ragnar? Maybe Hood to Coast? But we also agreed that one per season is probably enough. That kind of sleep deprivation is best enjoyed only on special occasions.
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