The Hanover Collaboration

So some people keep their courage in a suitcase, I’ve got a well. With a suitcase, you can pick it up and you know right away how much you’ve got left. With the well you think you’ve got a never-ending supply until one day the bucket comes back up muddy and the next day you’re scraping the bottom.

The adjective “fell” is one you might recognize from Tolkien as meaning cruel or sinister. In trail running it’s used to describe a course that is gratuitously difficult. For instance one might use it to describe a course with streambed sections, a sand hill and lots and lots of mud. But Eb assures me that the race director didn’t go out of his was to get all that mud, the sand hill was short with pretty firm footing and falling in the stream was always refreshing. Oh yeah, I should mention the “drop bags”. You had two drop bags that they took out on the course for you. You were supposed to have changes of shoes/clothes for after the streambed sections. That is so wimpy.

Stage 1 was a 26 mile boat. I could have rented a surfski for $150 but that would have been too much money and I would have probably preferred a sculling shell (even though the winner was in a surfski). If you do all three races you get a $45 penalty on your combined entry fee and you don’t get as many T-shirts.

So I’ll start with stage 2, a 50k run (that isn’t the exact course, the actual course was a fair ways longer, but make sure you look at the pictures). Eben and I started out together and went at a pretty easy pace to the base of Jay. There was a relatively short streambed section, maybe a half mile (there were about 3 mile of streambed total in the race) where we went pretty much as slow as we could and were netting a lot of places. It seemed that we were somewhat gifted at tromping up streambeds.

We settled in to a pretty respectable walk up to the summit of Jay at about 9 miles. We were chatting (mostly about how awesome we were) while most of the people we were with were breathing hard. This was pretty typical of the whole event for me. I mostly hung around with people who were hurting more than me—people who were slower but tougher and more serious. In general they seemed to have a notably strong preference for twenty-n’th place rather than twenty-n-plus-one’th place.

Anyway we hit the Jay downhill and Eben takes off. Once upon a time, I could run downhills that fast, but not anymore. As it was, I still netted like a dozen people on the downhill while Eben did that and also put at least 90 seconds and another 8 or so places into me. Towards the bottom it settled into slightly downhill cat tracks, the kind of stuff you hit at the end of awesome tree runs and have to skate for what seems like a half hour. I pushed this section stupidly hard and caught back up with Eb far sooner than would have been wise. At this point I was still imagining running all day with him.

Now we are around tenth place and we hit some rolly gradual climbs. After running down like we did, my legs are not up for it. So I settle on a walk. Pretty much everyone else keeps running including Eb who seems to want to run with these guys despite the fact that they are pretty intent of suffering more than I had planned on for myself. It starts to dawn on me that Eb is still a “racer” and that he is hanging with these guys for a reason. My suspicion is confirmed when he launches an outright attack on the next sustained downhill. I start to follow the move but quickly think better of it and throw out the anchor, starting the long walk backwards from top ten to where I wanted to be.

On a long straightaway about a half-mile later, I get my last glimpse of Eben. He put about 75 seconds into me in a half mile of gradual downhill. Extrapolating, that boded very well for him and/or poorly for me. I’m guessing that this was at about 14mi and 3.25hrs. Despite the fact that the profile looked pretty easy from there out, it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to be anywhere close to my 50K PR (from high school—back when the well was bottomless).

The sun was getting pretty damn high and we were all feeling it. Every time we crossed a stream, I submerged in it for a little while. On the streambed sections, I layed down in every little pool I passed. I foresook a brige to go for a swim and I didn’t use the rope so I could swim better. The water felt fantastic. This really played into my new mental model for the race which was ODventure. Of course I got passed by people while I was taking these swim breaks, but I was getting passed by people who didn’t look as happy as me. That is to say nothing about berry-breaks of which I also took several. People going by during berry-breaks seemed pretty pissed at me. The wild strawberries and raspberries were ripe and the course tagged a blueberry farm. At the farm there was an aid station around the bend where they had cups of berries already picked, so I was a little annoyed that I had spent so long picking my own.

Anyway, I settled on a managable pace that consisted of running a) downhills and b) non-muddy flats in the shade while walking everything else. This was a managable strategy since there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of (b) on the course.

I actually caught back up with someone with about a mile to go. This really lit a fire under the guy and he went really hard to drop me. Then he had to walk despite that it was one of the few shady, non-muddy flats so I caught back up again. So he ran hard again and it got muddy so I walked some more and he got a gap which he maintained to the end. I mention this because it was fun to watch. He was killing himself. He splashed his head in a gross mud puddle because he was so hot (it had crossed my mind, of course, but I didn’t need it badly enough). He was constantly looking back at me, and start running if I ran or walking if I walked. He didn’t realize that I was a “finisher” and not a racer.

I got my finisher medal a burger and some beer and soaked my legs in the stream and worried about the bike the next day.

Congratulations Eben on 9th place boy, 10th overall! Why don’t you post about it.