Monday, October 23, 2017

Grindstone 2017; or, the Mustache

        This is a race report for the 2017 edition of Grindstone.  Now that I’ve made that clear, let’s talk about some obscure cinema.  Back in my college and post-grad days, before a professional career, before a marriage, and before a child, I was a huge cinephile.  The more obscure the movie, the more difficult to find its meaning, and the more, let’s say, pretentious it was, the better I’d like it.  I don’t have the time these days to seek out and watch 5 hour long Hungarian movies that were shot using only 10 long takes, but back then I did. (Actually, there’s probably a good thesis paper that can be written about the similarities between watching a Bela Tarr film and ultrarunning).

Anyway, back when I was a pretentious and douchey film nerd, I came across a French movie called La Moustache (or, if you are into freedom fries, The Moustache).  The plot concerns a moustachioed man shaving off the titular moustache, who then begins to become unwound as his wife, family, and co-workers fail to notice his clean upper lip and tell him that he never had a moustache in the first place.  As only a French film can, this premise is played completely seriously.  It is an existential examination of identity, memory, intimacy in a marriage, and likely many more heady ideas that remain lost on me.   
       
So, what the hell does this have to do with Grindstone?  Well, I’ll get to that soon.

I came into this year’s race in the worst possible way that anyone could approach a 100-miler.  I had signed up for Grindstone before I had completed Ouray 100.  My thinking was that I was almost certain to DNF Ouray and I needed another race on my schedule shortly-thereafter to sustain me through what I thought very well could be my first DNF.  Of course, I ended up completing Ouray, which left me lacking any motivation for Grindstone.  No motivation is no way to go into any hundred miler. 

The lack of training, resulting from my non-existent motivation, was also not ideal.  I figured that the high quality training that I had in my legs prior to Ouray would carry me through.  In the two months leading up to Grindstone, I only managed a single 80 mile week, but did throw in about 4 20 mile runs.  Not helping matters in the training department, work got super busy and running fell away to pulling 15 hour days at the office with minimal sleep.  Also, my wife was not too happy with me for running another 100 so soon after Ouray. 

With all of those impediments– low motivation, undertraining, and marital disapproval– you’d think it would have been an easy choice for me to DNS when a week prior to the race I came down with a nasty upper respiratory infection.  This culminated with me losing my voice completely on the Thursday before the start. 

Sometimes there is a thin line between stupidity and bravery.  This was not one of those times.  Completely stupidly I decided that taking the start line at Grindstone with a likely sinus infection, laryngitis, and the ability to only whisper was a good idea.  I joked with my wife (in a whisper of course) that I was going to put labels on my shirt with the food that I wanted at the aid stations so that I could point to my shirt to communicate with the volunteers.  Alas, I didn’t follow through with wearing my potato, quesadilla, pierogi, and mountain dew shirt, but Salomon, if you want to finance it, call me.

Why did I decide to ever leave my tent?
 
          I rationalized my decision to start the race because besides not having a voice and having a nose full of snot, I otherwise did not feel too bad.  At the start of the race, I threw my headphones in my ears, without any music, to attempt to avoid the awkwardness of conversation out on the trail where I couldn’t converse back, and off I went at the 6 pm start.  Through the first ten miles, my voice began to come back, probably due to the large quantities of Tailwind that I was imbibing (New marketing spin for Tailwind as a cure for laryngitis, perhaps) and I was feeling pretty good, though I was taking it relatively slow.  On the downhill from Elliot’s Knob to Dry Branch Gap, however, I began falling apart.  By the time I got into the Dry Branch Gap aid station, I was thinking about DNFing.  I decided to continue on from Dry Branch however and reassess at Dowells Draft at around mile 22.  The miles after Dry Branch would be the worst I have ever experienced in a race.  I felt feverish and miserable.  (I should also note here that I am the biggest wimp when it comes to being sick.  Sprains, bleeding wounds, and broken bones are nothing to me.  Some sniffles and a sore throat, however, and I’ll be crying for death).  I figured that maybe I would feel better once I finished the ascent of Crawford Mountain.  Nope.  I felt even worse on the descent.  I couldn’t run at all and was being passed by what felt like hundreds of runners.  I decided at that point that my race was done.  All I wanted to do was to crawl into the sleeping bag in my tent and doze off for 12 hours.  I stopped a few times to try to do a calculus of whether I should drop when I got to Dowells or turn back to Dry Branch.  Because I was going so slowly, I had run out of any water or Tailwind.  I decided that since Dowells was only about 3 miles away and mostly downhill that I would continue on and drop there.  I kept cursing myself for making the monumentally stupid decision to think that I could complete the race while sick. 

During this period of self-loathing and introspective despair, there was a faint thought just on the recesses of my consciousness that was telling me that miles 15 through 20 in a hundred miler are always, for some reason, the hardest miles for me.  I think it has something to do with the thought of the immense amount of running that is still ahead combined with the first feelings of tiredness in my legs that creates this slump for me without fail in every single hundred (and 50 miler) that I’ve run.  Perhaps this was just a particularly bad version of this habitual slump due to my head cold, or more precisely the mental doubt produced by knowing that I had another 80+ miles to run when I should have been home sleeping.  Of course, at the time, these thoughts were not as fully and consciously developed, and all I could think about was getting back to my sleeping bag.

As I descended, I decided to pop 2 ibuprofens (which is something that I would never think about doing so early in a race) and get some music pumping through my headphones.  Feeling warm and feverish, I also decided to take off my head tam, which I normally have to wear with my headlamp to keep my lamp secured on my head due to my long hair.  Then, magically, as can only be truly understood by an ultrarunner, I began feeling better.  As the descent mellowed out, I began running again.  Cornily and cliched, but serendipitously, Fear Factory’s “Resurrection” began playing through my headphones from my random iphone mix.  Tears came to my eyes as I thought that this was the reason why I loved ultras so much– the fact that one minute you can feel so bad and the next minute so ecstatic.  Coming into Dowells, I quickly grabbed my drop bag items, and ran up the ascent.  I was feeling great and passing lots of runners to boot.

Besides a stomach issue that I was able to resolve, so to speak, for the next forty miles I was feeling great.  I was feeling so good, that the fact that the snot rockets that I was blowing had turned red instead of green did not bother me.  As I reached the turn around, I even began to have thoughts of negative-splitting the course.  Along the way, I pulled off some 9 minute miles and even on the uphills was managing sub-12 minute miles.  I was flying past other runners.  I luxuriated in the gorgeous sunrise that we were being treated to. 

Trust me, it looked much better in person
          And I completely failed to consider what is axiomatic in ultrarunning– while it can’t always get worse and will get better, if you are feeling good, you are bound to feel bad again. You can’t let the lows get you too low or the highs get you too high.  As I hit the long descent after Little Bald, I would become intimately reacquainted with this maxim.  And this time, there would be no resurrection.  My body had simply given up the fight - it was fighting on too many fronts at once.  It was amazing how sudden it was– I went from feeling on top of the world to complete misery.  I had no energy.  My quads were shot.  My knees hurt (and I hadn’t had any issues with runner’s knee since 15 years prior when I first started running and decided it was a good idea to do so in a pair of $5 Pumas I had found at a thrift store).  I felt like I had a huge lump in my throat and could not clear it.  Meanwhile, I was making myself nauseous because I was swallowing so much bloody mucus. 

Everyone that I had passed, quickly passed me again.  I could still grind out the uphills, but the downhills were absolute misery. 

As I came into Dowells Draft, it was completely dark.  After Dowells, I knew there was only one remaining long uphill section and that it was net downhill to the finish.  However, somehow, despite having run this race last year, I had completely forgot (or suppressed) how extraordinarily difficult the last 20 miles are. 

And now we get back to the La Moustache reference at the start of this race report.  If you read anything about Grindstone online, you’ll learn that it is an out-and-back course.  You go 50 or so miles to the turnaround, and besides two short digressions up to two peaks, you return the same way you came.  The RD, Clark, will tell you that it is an out-and-back course.  Other runners will tell you it is an out-and-back course.  And this is where I feel like the protagonist of La Moustache, sure that I had a moustache when everyone around me tells me that my upper lip has always been clean.  Despite maps and even my Strava data showing me that the last 20 miles are the same as the first 20 miles, I swear to you that they are not and that Clark has somehow found a way to make the last 20 miles go through a parallel dimension where the terrain is altogether different and much more difficult on the way back. 

Running those last 20 miles, you’ll climb up to Elliot’s Knob on a 20%+ gradient on nothing but loose rocks and shale while perilously close to the edge of a steep drop off and know that this simply was not the same trail that you had run down some 20+ hours previous.  While on the way out it just looked like a normal trail, on the way back everything will look different and sinister.  You’ll get to a downhill section on a fire road, which you will remember from the way out, but you’ll keep running downhill on this fire road for much, much longer than you ran on the way up.  (This year that downhill section would be made even more surreal by the heavy fog that had descended upon the mountains, making visibility non-existent, and at least for me, the appearance of a runner passing me clad only in what I could guess were My Little Pony tightey-whiteys.  And I’m 99% sure this was real and not a hallucination).  Then you’ll get to the Falls Hollow aid station, where one of the volunteers will provide you with a slice of chess pie and a cup of coffee and you’ll really be confused about what parallel universe you have entered.  (But seriously, try that pie– it’s fantastic!). 

Then you’ll get to the last 5 miles.  A runner told me last year that the last 5 miles is on a different course than the first 5 miles.  I believe, that like Laurence Fishburne in the Matrix, that this runner was trying to offer me the red pill.  I’ve sat maniacally studying my Strava map on the way out and the way back, and on paper it looks like the same exact trails were used.  If you’re like me, you’ll begin to doubt your sanity.  You’ll know that those last 5 miles are not even close to the same miles that you ran on the way out.  You’ll know that those gigantic, jagged rocks that litter the trail simply were not there on the way out.  You’ll wonder what kind of rat bastard psychotic would transport and throw all of those rocks on the trail to make your return trip so much harder.  You’ll also feel that even though you are following the course markings, you are definitely going around in circles and wonder whose idea it was to design a spiral trail.  Also, those five miles will somehow feel like at least double that.  You will not recognize any of the course from when you set out what feels like months ago and you’ll think to yourself- “How long have I been out on this course that they were able to change the trail before I got back to camp?”  Like an acid-tripping Descartes, you will actually doubt the truth of everything and regard the material world as a mere dream.

Or, at least that was my experience.  YMMV.  The simple lesson- don’t try to run a 100 miler while sick or you too may experience such existential dread.  And if that lesson doesn’t resonate, let’s get back to the other reason why I referenced La Moustache.  During the last part of the race, concerned runners kept asking me if I was okay.  I thought to myself, is my existential dread really that apparent?  Also, I know I’m moving slow, but so is everyone else.  I only saw the reason for their concern after heading to the showers after the race.  Looking in the mirror, I was aghast.  Remember when I mentioned those blood boogers during the race?  Well, looking in the mirror, my actual mustache was stained and crusted red from running for many hours with a runny and bloody nose.  The next day, I would shave the moustache, not wanting to remember and needing to forget the horror of my bloody Tom Selleck.     
                 

Other thoughts:  

1.  Despite struggling both physically and mentally worse that I have in any race, I hardly had any hallucinations.  Near the end of the race, a runner ahead of me stopped to take a piss on the side of the trail.  I did have to apologize to him as I went by him for staring at him for so long because I thought that he had found a on-trail haberdashery, and I was interested in the suit and hat rack that he had stopped to peruse.  

2.  Sometimes you can learn something when you are full of despair and introspection out on the trail.  For me, I came to the conclusion that first, Grindstone is really a downhill course and downhill running is much more important to doing well, second, that Grindstone is actually more technical of a course than I remember from last year, and third, that my traits as a runner really do not suit me to doing well at Grindstone and that even if I am not sick, I always am going to struggle on the technical downhill sections.   

3.  Next year, I'm probably going to skip any organized 100 mile race, unless I hit the lottery with Hardrock or Western States.  I would like to try to get a good time at Mountain Masochist, which with its majority fire road course, would seem to suit my lack of coordination and technical running ability much better.  Also, I'd like to get into some multiday light-packing/running adventures, which I miss since focusing more on 100 milers and which are the reason that I really got into ultrarunning.