Crazy endurance eyes

There's something inherently primal about the Steep Ravine Trail after four hours of running. Really, most everything feels primal after four hours of running — the murmur of an overtaxed heart, the taste of salt on moist lips, the angry throbbing of a bruised knee, the gritty film of sweat and dirt on skin. But when I take all of that to the Steep Ravine Trail — located in a small canyon of a popular recreation area and a stone's throw from one of the most populated urban regions in the United States — I'm always transported back to a primordial jungle, vaguely tropical, shrouded in mist and a cloak of creepy silence.

There's a gurgling brook, thick-leaf ferns, and ancient redwood trees blotting out the sunlight. I listen for animal sounds — in this fantasy, it's not mountain lions or coyotes, but monkeys and mastodons — as I pick my way up a staircase of slimy rocks. Another human with hunched shoulders appears in my sightline, and I strain to match his steps and maybe catch him. At this point in the run, I can't decide whether I'm the hunter or the hunted. Blood seeps from my scarred elbow and I feel much more like the latter, strung out and wild-eyed, stumbling toward exhaustion as an unseen predator closes in. A drumbeat of footsteps shuffle up from behind, and two women wearing pink pass me without a word. I'm broken, done, my heart beats on fumes, and I still have twelve more miles in front of me.

Somewhere in the recesses of logical thought, I know it's been a long season of endurance efforts and I'm just tired, simply tired. Because of this I'm not strong, and I'm not fast, and anything I accomplish on this day is going to seem pitifully mediocre, even relative to myself. "It's just a 50K. A race for fun. No reason to kill yourself." And yet, something about the women in pink sparks my primeval instinct, a deeper vein of energy within my tapped-out heart. I vow to keep up with them. Not because I could win this race, not even close, or even beat them, because I won't. But by keeping them in sight, I can assure myself that I still have the power to rage, rage against the dying of the light. Plus, that's the game, and it's fun.

While planning their California trip, our friends Dan and Amy signed up for a trail half marathon on Sunday, the Mount Tam Trail Run. Beat and I decided to join them and, true to form, never even discussed just sticking to the shorter distance and running with our friends. No, we signed up for the 50K distance, because, well, why not double the fun? There was no mention of the sore muscles and fatigue that still lingered less than a week after the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow, or the fact that this course wasn't just any old 50K, but a rather technical trail run with nearly 8,000 feet of climbing. I basically feel embarrassed about the fitness hole I'm digging at this point, so I didn't mention our plan to anyone besides Dan and Amy. And yet I really wanted to race the Mount Tam 50K. That is, I was giddy about the prospect. I had little to gain, and yet I had nothing to lose. It's these wide-open playing fields where the game truly breaks free.

Unsurprisingly, I struggled from the start. During the first ascent of Steep Ravine, I had to strain my body's higher gears just to stay ahead of my personal "No twenty-minute miles in a 50K" rule. We veered onto the rockier Ben Johnson Trail, where I caught my foot on a boulder and went down, slapping the dirt hard enough that runners who were several switchbacks above me turned around to see what happened. "Are you okay? That sounded hard," one woman shouted down to me as I dusted myself off and checked my shirt for blood. I always panic about my elbows after a crash, but the harsher pain was emanating from a rapidly forming goose egg on my knee. "I need to watch where I'm going. I was looking over there," I said as I waved at the vista of redwood-covered mountains rippling toward the sea. Despite my physical struggles, this was a gorgeous day in a beautiful place, and the combination of pretty scenery and endorphins never fails to put me in a good mood.

I saw Beat only once, near the 30K turnaround at Stinson Beach. He claimed he was feeling bad but seemed to be moving strong. I could have easily laid down right there and slept rest of the afternoon away. Any hope that my reserve diesel engine might kick in sputtered and died as I started back up the mountain. No, there would be no bailouts today. There would only be decisions, and head games. The distance had chased me into a stupor and the only play I had left was to switch roles and become a chaser. So I turned my gaze away from the dreamlike jungle canopy, fixed my eyes on the trail, and marched.

Photo by Inside Trail Racing

As the long climb stretched out, I looked up often to make sure the women in pink were still in sight. My legs and lungs were burning, a sure sign of overexertion — something I don't often do. Yes, I go outside and play for a long time, often, but I do so with a strong self preservation instinct that's difficult for me to turn off. My psyche thrives on the perception that I can do something all day, and all day the next day, and the next. Even though that's not how it works, what I want the most is to turn myself into a kind of perpetual motion machine. Speed, by its nature of breakdown and necessary time to rebuild, just can't be part of that equation. So I haven't been training at my true upper limit. On the rarer occasions that I do peg it, I feel like someone is stabbing me all over with tiny pins. And here I was, somewhere in the muddled middle of a 50K, stoking a dying fire with everything I had to burn.

Photo by Inside Trail Racing

For the past few races I've been experimenting with a few more "whole foods" in my fueling strategy, which mainly means I've been trying to skew my intake away from 95 percent sugar. During the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow, I took in a lot of calories from a bunch of bland but nutritious burritos filled with black beans, rice, salt, and avocado. During the Mount Tam Trail Run I utilized the aid stations' boiled potatoes and pink sports drink. But on my third return to the ridge-top aid station, where the women in pink had already come and gone, I no longer had the time or energy to spare on health food. I grabbed a handful of Mike and Ikes and M&Ms, stuffed them in my mouth in one big chewy chocolaty sugar bomb, and took off as fast as I could down the hill.

Running downhill full-bore is something I never do. Again, my sense of balance is too weak, and my self-preservation instinct too strong. But I had to make up time somewhere because the women in pink were stronger climbers than me, so I loosened the brakes and took, for me at least, big leaps of faith down the concrete-like Dipsea Trail. I was seeing stars by the time I started across the Muir Valley, so I had to slow my pace to save something for the final climb.

Photo by Inside Trail Racing

As I started up the Heather Cutoff, I decided that I hate switchbacks. Sure, I get that they're necessary for erosion control. And of course as a mountain biker, I prefer switchbacks to steep death trails. But if I'm on foot, give me a trail that shoots straight up the mountain any day. I'll happily march up, and then I'll march back down, because I'm a happy hiker. Switchbacks only make for long, long stretches of runnable punishment that hurt to jog at 12-minute-mile pace, and somehow hurt even more to walk at 16-minute-mile pace. I so wanted to slow to 20-minute-miles, but I couldn't let myself do that, because I was running a 50K. Also, I needed to stay ahead of the women in pink, so I alternated jogging and walking, and both hurt a lot. Another woman caught and passed me, followed by the women in pink, and I tried to keep up. Oh, I tried. I felt like I was running through knee-deep water, watching them effortlessly skim the surface and disappear into the trees.

The women in pink didn't even stop at the last aid station, but my fuel gauge was below empty so I had no choice but to take some time to stuff down more M&Ms. The first woman who passed me thanked me for serving as a pacer to help her get up the long climb. "I just wanted to see if I could catch you, and I did," she said. "But I won't be able to keep up any more."

"You think I'm a faster descender than you?" I said with an unintentional smirk. If only she knew. I'm a terrible downhill runner, and the final three miles into Stinson Beach included lots of slime-coated stairs that I usually tiptoe down. I've been passed by children hiking with their families on this section of trail in the past. "You'll be faster than me on this section, for sure." We both looked at each other with an appreciative smile, finished up our pink drink and started down the Dipsea Trail. In my mind, the race was on.

About a quarter mile down the trail, I looked over my shoulder one last time, and then don't remember much after that. The M&Ms hadn't finished processing quite yet and I was sputtering on fumes, working with some kind of primitive drive that only understood forward motion, without hope for the future or regret for the past. Somehow I made it down the stairs in one piece and started up the last little knoll only to see the silhouettes of two female runners cresting the horizon that was the top of the hill, out of reach.

I tried to catch up. Oh, I tried. Not because I really cared either way, because how could it matter? But there was something primally satisfying about coming so close to beating a weakness that I didn't believe I could actually beat. As long as they didn't fade, that meant I didn't fade. So I fought with everything I had to the very end. When I ran across the finish line, there was nothing left. I wobbled over to a picnic table and put my head between my knees in a cloud of dizziness and nausea. It was as close as I've ever come to actually collapsing at a finish line.

My finishing time was 7:18, seventeen minutes after Beat. It was one of my worst times in a 50K (although this course is, in my opinion, the most difficult that I've raced. Beat thinks the Ohlone 50K is harder, but excepting for heat on that course, I'm inclined to disagree. Mount Tam/Steep Ravine is more technical and this version even has the endless uphill switchbacks.) The women in pink beat me by two minutes and five seconds.

Still, I was proud of my performance in my impromptu pointless 50K race. Because like a pedestrian passing by a donation jar with just a few quarters left in my pocket, I know I gave it everything I had to give. And doing so made it so much more satisfying, and fun.

Autumn comes to California

 I drove home from Utah on Tuesday, which allowed for twelve hours of guilt-free election monitoring courtesy of NPR. Although I despise campaign season as much as everyone else, I love election day. It's like watching an elaborate game unfold with all the emotions and surprises that go along with it. It also reminds me of the good old days in the newsroom, where election day was often the hardest, most stressful, and yet most fun day of the year. Election Day is the endurance race of community journalism. And even though I was behind the wheel of a Subaru shuttling a bunch of dirty bicycles home from the desert, NPR provided a welcome escape into the frantic numbers crunching and anticipation of the outside world.

Fatigue set in again after the drive. Or, really, not so much set in as settled back in. I'll be honest — it's become an interesting personal experiment for me. Where is my edge, and does it, in fact, exist?   Or is equilibrium possible? What I learn could prove to be very helpful in future long-distance challenges, or so I tell myself when the fitness guilt returns. On Wednesday and Thursday, I went running on my regular 6.5-mile trail loop in Rancho San Antonio, and during both runs I posted times near my best times on that route (although, to be fair, the 6.5-mile loop isn't the one I typically "race" myself on. It's the one I run when I'm tired.) On Friday, our friends Dan and Amy came to visit us from Anchorage. Thanks to their vacation research, I discovered there's a new touring-specific bicycle shop located a half-mile from my house (!!!) And since Dan and Amy are already knee deep in snow and single-digit temperatures up in Alaska, we wanted to give them a small taste of California dirt before they set out on their wine country road tour next week.

I was under the impression that coastal California didn't experience much if any autumn-related change, but maybe that's because I spent so little time here in November last year. We saw a lot of color on our Steven's Creek loop, from sprigs of new grass on the previously summer-toasted hillsides, to yellow trees, to sienna leaves carpeting the trail. I admit that I'm so drawn by the intrigue of travel that I often forget about the beauty in my own backyard. I had more fun on this routine loop than I've had in a while. Dan was sprinting ahead to capture photos of Liehann bunny hopping big air off the leaves, Amy told funny stories, and Beat and I happily donned our puffy coats while the Alaskans rolled their eyes at us wimpy Californians. But it's cold here, even if ever so slightly, and this makes me happy.

The four of us are headed to another race tomorrow. It should be, uh, interesting. But the race was Dan and Amy's idea, and I want my friends to enjoy their vacation. Or, as Amy called it earlier today, "Beat and Jill's beatdown boot camp." At the time, she was talking about our fun little three-hour mountain bike ride. Oh, Amy, you should know us better by now. 

Hollowed out

I cling to the perception that I'm a hopeless endurance junkie, but it's revealing that I spent my favorite hour of the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow unconscious. It was the darkest, coldest hour of them all, the one right before dawn. I'd managed to keep my internal diesel engine humming through the night, but as I climbed up Gooseberry Base for the twelfth time, even that began to sputter. Lactic acid flooded into my legs, and then the dizzy spells returned. By the time I hit the slabs, my body felt as spent as it did way back during lap two, and my sense of coordination was even worse, if that's possible. The bike lurched over ledges and I slammed my front wheel into boulder after boulder, utterly lacking the power to lift up my handlebars. Even when I relented to the push, I stumbled and hit my shins on my pedals. I hated the slabs, hated them with the piercing chill of a thousand desert winters. This icy hate is what now filled my heart at the end of every Frog Hollow lap.

Back at the pit, I fumbled through my procrastination routine of nibbling on a nearly-frozen vegetarian burrito, washing it down with a mini Snickers Bar, switching my lights, adjusting my layers, fiddling with my shock, checking my tires, and staring hatefully at the half moon. A chill crept in as Beat made coffee, and we joked about heating up the interior of the car and drinking our coffee inside. Then it became less of a joke. And before I even fully acknowledged the decision, I was slumped in the passenger seat with an empty titanium cup in one hand and my helmet in the other. "Just fifteen minutes," I mumbled. "Maybe I'll feel better after a little nap."

A lead blanket of drowsiness settled over my aching joints, and I accepted it with the shifty guilt of a child nibbling the edges of a forbidden cookie. In a single-day race, sleep isn't justified, or even needed. Sleep was indulgence, simple and plain, and yet I couldn't remember ever feeling such divine relief. Sleep swept me away from the ink-colored sky, the creepy canyons, the jeep road climb that somehow grew progressively longer with every lap, the flickering lights, and the slabs. Oh the hateful slabs. Benevolent sleep took all of my icy abhorrence, my aches, my feelings of inadequacy, and flushed them into a beautiful void. I was out cold.

Liehann, Beat, and I display our cutthroat competitiveness at the race start. Photo by Trang Pham

That I had even ridden double-digit laps was more than I expected. Given how I've felt on the bike and in general for the past month, how spotty my fitness seems right now, and how few miles I've ridden in total since June, I wasn't expecting the performance of my life. It was worth going because Frog Hollow is a good course — a 13-mile loop with 5.5 miles of jeep road, 7.5 miles of singletrack, and equal parts of challenge, fun, and humbling reality checks — and the event is full of great people and good humor. Months ago, Beat and I made plans to race solo along with our friend Liehann, and expected to see other friends at the venue as well. It was a vacation. I know I've taken a lot of those, and yet my appreciation of the opportunities I have to engage in adventures never wears off no matter how tired my body feels. So I was going to race, and my strategy was to start out slow, and then slow down.

Photo by Trang Pham

About four miles in, I realized that even this race strategy wasn't going to work. I'd purposely started near the back and my climbing pace wasn't just slow, it was glacial. And yet I felt horrible — lactic acid legs, sore shoulders, and dizziness. What was with this dizziness? I launched into the Jem Trail, a flowing piece of smooth singletrack, and could barely keep my wheels from veering into the bushes. I was riding like a drunken beginner, worse than that, because race guilt was creeping in and I wasn't even halfway through the first lap. I burned way too many matches powering over the mini steps at the bottom of Jem. By the time I hit the Virgin Rim jeep road, I was so fried that I coasted the gradually descending slope at about 8 mph, just so I could recover. Then I came face to face with the slabs. First lap meant I needed to at least try to ride this section, but doing so just made a mockery of mountain bikers everywhere. I dabbed so many times that my bike might as well have been a velocipede, and still I managed to slam into bushes. The Virgin Rim trail is rocky but doesn't require advanced technical skills by any stretch of the imagination. I was just riding poorly, because my head was spinning and my legs had no power. The first lap ended with the unsettling anxiety that I might not even have the stamina to finish a second.

Beat had decided to wait for me at the pit, and we set out together for lap two. Beat was riding Frog Hollow with a cracked rib from a mountain bike crash two weeks earlier, and on top of that he was riding a singlespeed, which demands a lot more core strength than granny-geared bikes to power up climbs. I thought he was in for a world of hurt, but he claimed his rib wasn't giving him too much trouble — he was just experiencing the usual pains that crop up when one doesn't train on bikes, such as sore butt and knees. I complained about my lactic acid fatigue and dizzy spells, and lamented that "I used to be so much better at mountain biking." "You were never that good at mountain biking," Beat replied matter-of-factly. Which is true ... I admit I've fumbled through a lot of miles while avoiding the mastery of technical skills and cultivating a growing fear of speed ... but it's still disheartening to have that truth pointed out to me at the beginning of a long mountain bike race. I'd rather just hold onto the delusion that I used to be able to dance over the slabs and that maybe, just maybe, I'd find my way back to the grace and poise that I never actually had. (I should mention that Beat also pointed out my supreme slogging abilities, so his statement wasn't as harsh as it sounds.)

But the vistas surrounding the Frog Hollow course are stunning, and the flowing Jem Trail is and will forever be near-effortless fun. So I kept pounding out miles with the hope that somehow, somewhere, I'd find something. That something came during lap four, which was more than fifty miles into the race. I reached the top of the Gooseberry Base and realized I couldn't remember anything about the climb. The malaise and fatigue that had shadowed me for three laps finally faded away. It was as though my body finally resigned itself — "Fine, we see that this is how it's going to be" — and fired up the trusty old diesel generator that it saves for tough times. For a long time after that, nothing was as hard as it had been. I was still moving relatively slowly, but at least it didn't feel so bad.

The return of the ol' diesel engine after five hours of struggle brought my thoughts back to the book I've been reading that I wrote about last week, "Flow." In one section, the author wrote about the assumption that "extreme" athletes, such as climbers, engage in risky behaviors because they have a pathological need to experience danger, that they are exorcising deep-seated fears, or are simply reckless sensation seekers. He argues that, actually, the whole point of climbing is to avoid danger as much as possible by developing the skills and knowledge to overcome risk. "Enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, but from their ability to minimize it. So rather than a pathological thrill that comes from courting disaster, the positive emotion they enjoy is being able to control potentially dangerous forces."

This sense of control also applies to suffering, I believe. I seek out physically grueling challenges not because I have a psychological misfire that leads me to believe I actually enjoy suffering, but because by confronting suffering, I teach myself how to control it. I derive a lot of pleasure from rejecting physical discomfort and mastering my emotions amid hard struggles. And once I push over that seemingly impossible wall, there's real joy in the realization that I've freed myself from my own suffering, and I could probably just keep going, as long as I want to keep going.

After lap two, Beat and I largely stuck together. He always climbed faster than me, so he waited at the top of the Jem Trail. With the aid of my big ring, I usually stayed ahead on the descents, but he caught back up in the heart of the slabs, where we could struggle and commiserate together. Beat compared the pains of the 25-hour race to a hundred-mile ultramarathon, noting that, "In running, if you're hurting, at least you can slow down and walk for a while. But on a bike, you just have to take the beating." Another aspect of the bike race we commiserated about was the constant barrage of team racers — you know, the guys riding four- and five-person relays, pounding out 45-minute laps with fierce aggressiveness. The majority were nice, announced their presence, and snuck past gently. But there were a handful of jerks that barreled past regardless of how little room there was on the trail, and I was shoulder-checked once and twice nearly knocked off my saddle. But courtesy aside, it was disheartening to have to constantly listen over my shoulder, waiting to pull over so I could let someone pass. It broke my flow in the best of situations, and in the worst left me rattled and upset. I realize that relay teams are a staple of 24-hour racing, but it's difficult to share a course with something that is effectively a different race. I'm sure they don't like having to pass the slow soloists any more than we like being passed.

After lap eight, Beat decided he was well on track to hit his target of ten laps, and wanted to sleep for a while. It was still before midnight, and I was hoping for a little more relative solitude as some of the teams and solo racers decided to call it a night. I continued through my pleasant daze, diesel engine humming, surprised by how okay I felt, still. Because of my "slow down" strategy, I always spent a long time in my pit, savoring my burritos and making sure everything on my bike was adjusted just right. Sometimes I would just stand there looking at the stars until the chill set in, and then I'd launch into a new loop having little concept of how many miles had passed, or what time it was. It was a beautiful sort of perpetual motion, interrupted only by my extreme disdain of the slabs.

Photo by Trang Pham

As I was setting out for my twelfth lap, Beat and Liehann rustled out of their tents. Liehann had decided to take a short nap as well after his shock busted and would no longer compress, leaving him with severe hand pain. But Liehann is a little competitive and wanted to muster at least more laps than me, so we all set out together. It was just after 3 a.m. Something about that lap broke my endurance spell, and I was back to feeling dizzy, achy, and now because of the late hour, sleepy. After struggling through lap twelve, it didn't take much to convince myself a fifteen-minute nap in the car was a great idea, which turned to thirty minutes, and then an hour. The sky was washed in pink light when Beat and I finally emerged, agreeing I could bust out one more lap so I could at least match what I rode last year, which is thirteen laps and 169 miles.

Photo by Dave Nice

Liehann, Beat, and I stayed together for the sunrise lap, taking it slow, stopping at vistas, and chatting with volunteers along the way. We called it our "victory lap," acknowledging that while we had energy to ride it faster and time to ride another, we didn't really want to. The most difficult part of 24-hour racing is finding motivation, especially if you're not particularly competitive with other people. One my goals were achieved — to come to Southwestern Utah and ride lots and see friends and have fun — it was difficult to ignore how much my butt really did hurt and how my legs were still so sore.

Beat got his ten laps and Liehann netted fourteen. We finished the victory lap at 9 a.m. sharp (24:00), which was good enough for me to finish fourth among female soloists. Riding a fourteenth lap that finished after 25:00 wouldn't have lifted me any higher in the standings. If I wanted to podium, my only option would have been to skip the nap and wedge in a fifteenth lap. Even if I had known that's where I stood in the rankings, I doubt a third place standing would have been motivation enough to skip that wonderful nap. Still, fifteen laps has always been my goal at Frog Hollow. Despite my shortcomings, it was definitely achievable this year and I can't help but wonder if I might have motivated toward it had I gone into the race with a clearer goal. Maybe someday, when the reality of just how many times I've ridden that loop has faded from my memory, I'll feel motivated to go back and try.

Still, any day that includes nearly 170 miles of mountain biking, and homemade banana bread, and a nap, can hardly be regarded as bad day. In fact, it was a great day. I'm not sure I love mountain bike racing, but I am a hopeless junkie for a long ride with friends.