"I often start out running with the wind at my back. So I feel good and I keep running a little farther, forgetting that it will be in my face on the way home."
- Jim Sweeney
In the 2004 Vermont 100, I finally discovered the answer to a question I’d been asking myself for some time: I found out how far I could go before I couldn’t run any farther. The answer was about 77 miles, if I was running on an extremely challenging course. Then I somehow found a way to push through that barrier and keep going until I reached the finish line.
Finishing the Vermont 100 was a peak experience. The race left me feeling more successful and confident than ever before. I had to abuse my body to get that feeling, but that’s what addicts do. I thought it was worth it, and like any other junkie, I wanted more.
Even before I recovered enough so I could walk normally, I started planning for another try. This time just finishing wouldn’t be enough. I wanted to finish in less than 24 hours and earn my buckle. To do that, I needed to cut three-and-a-half hours off my time. I looked back on my race to figure out what I had learned and how I could use that to improve.
The simplest way for me to finish faster would be to run farther. The last 23 miles had taken nine hours, so there was plenty of room for improvement there.
I was doing my extra-long runs every three or four weeks, whenever I could find a convenient long race. That made my training schedule somewhat haphazard, but eliminated the boredom of running 30 or 40 miles all by myself. This had worked pretty well so far. I planned to keep the same loose structure for my long runs while looking for ways to put in even more miles.
More mileage would help, but I wasn’t sure I had really exhausted my endurance in Vermont. The main reason I had to stop running after 77 miles was that my quadriceps were so painful I couldn’t keep running. Downhill running did the most damage. The more tired I got, the more I leaned back and coasted down hills without worrying about my form. I was landing on my heels and braking with every step. If I could avoid that, I’d reduce the wear and tear on my quads.
I had access to a gym at work, and I started going regularly to add some weight work. I figured if I had stronger quads and core trunk muscles, they would help me endure the abuse and hold better form further into the race.
In addition to training harder, there were a number of things that I thought I could try during the race to help my time.
I admire purists who try to do these races without a crew, but I would have been lost without mine. I needed someone to manage my gear and keep me on track. Sharing the experience with Mark and Karen had made all of it better. I decided to try to find a pacer to add to my crew. A good pacer might be able to lead me along a little faster through the last 30 miles. One would certainly help me get through the times where I’m confused because of exhaustion and lack of sleep. But he (or she) had to be the right person so the chemistry would work. My pacer would be spending more time with me than the rest of the crew, possibly in dire circumstances.
The old adage, "start slow, then ease off" definitely applies to ultramarathoning. If I ran slower at the start of the race, I could keep close to my initial pace, whatever it is, further into the race. As long as I can hold my pace in an ultra, sooner or later I begin to pass people. Each time I slowly reel in another runner, I get a little lift that helps me get to the next person. It takes a long time to pass someone at my pace, but that gives me something to do besides think about my discomfort.
Getting through the aid stations faster could easily save a big chunk of time. I learned a new phrase from the GAC runners in Vermont: "Beware the chair." I spent well over an hour, maybe as much as two hours, sitting, resting, and gathering the determination to move on. Getting out of the chair and moving again got harder after every break. I don’t know how much the rest helped keep me going. Sitting less during the race might end up hurting me towards the end. Still, I was sure that I could spend less time in the chair.
The summer heat was a problem. The terrycloth mitt soaked in icewater that GAC had for their runners would be a great addition to my crew’s kit. A small cloth bag for ice to go under my hat when it’s hottest would be another useful thing. We tried a plastic sandwich bag, but it didn’t help much. A cloth bag that slowly lets some icewater leak out would work much better.
I also needed to take enough electrolytes to replace the ones I sweated away. I got stupid as the race went on. Setting my watch to beep every half-hour would make it simpler to remember when it was time to take the Succeed capsules.
I wasn’t able to eat real food during most of the race. Energy gels and carbohydrate drinks provided enough energy, but some extra protein and fats from food might have helped extend the useful life of my quads. I decided to try training with liquid food substitutes like Ensure to see whether I could use them during a race to get more nutrients.
The chafing and blistering after 100 miles wasn’t too bad. I did a pretty good job of protecting myself from friction, but I knew some of that was luck. I was dry through most of the race, except for sweat. If the weather had been worse, friction from wet gear would have been much more of a problem.
Using different shoe models during the race to change the inevitable friction points between the shoes and my feet worked well. It was also good to have a slightly larger pair of shoes for later in the race. Softer shoes might have helped some with the pounding. Running in a pair of shoes that didn’t fit right was just dumb, but at least I resisted the temptation to run in my new trail shoes.
If I started to lose the ability to run downhill again, I could try running the uphill sections instead of walking. Running would be harder work, but it had to be faster than walking, and running uphill would put less stress on my quads.
The one most important thing I had learned was how difficult it was just to finish a 100-mile race. Low spots were unavoidable. I hoped my experience would help me be better prepared for them, and hopefully help me get through the low spots fast enough to buckle next time.
So far my ultramarathon efforts had paid off with fun and success, so I was eager to get started on the next round. I decided I’d go back to Vermont. There were other 100-mile races I could try, but I figured they could wait. It would be hard enough to go back to Vermont and try to do better without adding more travel and a different course to the problem. That meant I had a year to get ready for the next race.
Two weeks after the Vermont 100, I felt I had recovered enough to ramp my training up again. I put in a 30-mile week and everything felt fine, except for a little pain in my left hip. I did my first post-race long run three weeks after the race, a 28-mile run around Lake Quannapowitt, in the mid-August heat on concrete and asphalt, at the 24 Hour Relay. That irritated my hip a little more, but I ignored it.
I ran 22 miles on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, and then I followed that up on Labor Day by winning my age group in the Malden Irish-American 5K in 20:14. It wasn’t a particularly fast time, but the faster runners were all doing the 10K. I celebrated my medal with copious amounts of free post-race beer.
The next weekend, I tried a new way to extend my long run. I was already doing more than 40 miles at a time on some training runs. That was fine when I was preparing for 50-mile races, but I wanted more to get ready for the 100s. Extending my weekend training runs to 50 or 60 miles would help, but there were multiple problems with that idea. There were very few races of that length available to me that I could use for training runs. Running for 12-15 hours all by myself wouldn’t be fun. It would require mental toughness that I wasn’t sure I had. And longer runs would use up the entire day and probably require a significant amount of recovery time afterwards, at least at first.
Instead of trying to get all the miles into one run, I decided to break them up into two runs. On Saturday, I ran 30 miles using the 5-to-1 run-to-walk ratio I used for my longest training runs. Then on Sunday, I ran another 19, this time without walking so I could run along with some friends from SRR while they were doing their own long runs. I was still tired from Saturday while I was running on Sunday, so I got to practice what it felt like to run deep into an ultra, but by breaking the run up I didn’t wear down as much. That meant I didn’t have to interrupt my training significantly while I recovered.
That plan worked well enough so that two weekends later I was able to race leg 4 of the Lake Winnipesakuee Relay with a SRR team on Saturday and then run the 50K at the Vermont 50 on Sunday.
The weather in Vermont couldn’t have been more of a change from what it had been the previous year. Instead of a downpour, we enjoyed a beautiful New England fall weekend, with blue skies and a warm sun bringing out the peak colors of the foliage.
The 50K shares most of its course with the 50-mile race. It included the section I got lost on in 2003. This time, I had no problem staying on track, and my sore hip felt better running on trails instead of roads. I finished the race in 5:49. Once again, running the day’s lesser race paid off. I went home with a plaque for finishing third in my age group.
Three weeks later, I was back in Vermont for the Green Mountain Marathon. I spent three days prior to the race in bed with a fever, but I felt better on race day so I went to the start to get in a training run.
The race is run on a pleasant out-and-back course on quiet roads along the northern shores of Lake Champlain. I had run part of the course before, in a half-marathon that they used to hold at the same time as the marathon. The main feature that I remembered from the half was the cold wind from Canada that blows off the lake and across the course year after year.
This year there was early sun, the wind was subdued, and I cruised through the first half of the race at a pace well under my Boston qualifying time. In the second half of the race the sun went behind the clouds, the cold wind swept in, and my sore hip acted up. I slowed down dramatically and finished in 3:36.
After the marathon I had four weeks to get ready for my next big challenge, the Stone Cat 50. Jeff Washburn of Gil’s Athletic Club, whom I had met in Vermont, was the race director. GAC holds the Stone Cat on a 12.5-mile loop of trail in Ipswich, MA. The 50-mile runners do four loops, while other runners stop after two loops (plus a little more) to make a marathon.
My sore hip persisted through two more weeks of training. I needed to take some time to let it get better, but I didn’t want to skip the 50 and miss the chance to get in a long training run in a race that was a short drive from home. That weekend, GAC was organizing a practice run on the Stone Cat course. I decided to grind through that and then shut things down until the race, where I’d take my chances and see how my hip held up. The training run went OK. During the two weeks after that I didn’t run any more than three to five miles in a day.
The first snowstorm of the year arrived on race day. The race was scheduled to start at 6AM so most of us would finish before dark, but the snow took down a utility pole on the road to the start, so traffic had to be redirected. Jeff delayed the start of the race for an hour while everyone found the new route to the starting line, next to a school on the edge of the Willowdale State Forest.
I was worried about finding the trail in the snow, but when we finally got going, I had no problems. The path was clearly marked by the footprints of the runners ahead of me.
At the end of each loop, I ducked back into the school for a break and to restock my personal supplies. There were also two aid stations on the course, manned by cheerful GAC members serving hot soup and drinks. As the day passed, the GACers at the aid stations got more cheerful as they drained their stock of beer. I held off on sampling the brew while I was running. The aid crews looked like they needed what they had to ward off the cold, and there was the promise of beer for the runners at the finish.
The mix of snow and runners made for ever-changing trail conditions throughout the day. On the first loop, I churned through the snowy tracks left by the marathoners and 50 milers ahead of me. The second time around, the snow had slacked off and the trail was hard-packed and slippery. By the third pass, the snow was worn down and I was running on rocks and mud, but by the fourth loop the marathoners and faster ultrarunners were long gone, the snow had picked up again, and there was plenty of loose snow to soften the trail.
After the experience of finishing a 100-mile race, running a 50-mile race was much less daunting. I was much more confident while I was running. In spite of the weather, once I realized my hip was going to be OK, I knew I was going to finish. I crossed the line for the fourth and final time after dark in a time of 9:51.
I treated it as a training run and didn’t go all out, but I was still pleased with my time. My only issue was that there was no beer left when I was done, but Jeff shared some of his personal stash of root beer with me before I left for home.
I did two weeks of light running to recover, and then it was time to run the Mill Cities Relay with my SRR teammates. I ran the last two legs at Mill Cities, about 14 miles. My hip still felt fine, so I got back on track with my training for Vermont.
The rest of my life wasn’t going as well as my running. My wife and I were drifting apart. I spent more time away from the house. Bars, hashes, and long runs helped me avoid doing any work to keep my marriage together. We ended up splitting late in 2004 and getting a divorce early in 2005.
I started doing more socializing with a beer in my hand at hashes and pub runs. I drank to excess at times, but I managed my binges to avoid interfering with my long runs. I was in good enough shape so I could do quite a bit of drinking and still get in most of my runs.
I had a good job managing computer systems, but I wasn’t invested in it anymore. My work was easy, it fit in with my running schedule, there was some travel that took me to new places to run, and the pay and benefits were better than anything else I was likely to find, but that wasn’t enough. Maybe it’s a cliché, but if I had to show up to work every day, I wanted to do something that made me happy. Unfortunately, I had no idea what that might be.
In retrospect, it’s hard to tell how much my running contributed to my difficulties. The running was the only part of my life that I found rewarding. In true addictive fashion, instead of cutting back on my running to work on my problems, I increased the dosage, at least in part to try to avoid them. My accomplishments and the recognition they earned made me feel good, so I pushed even further to get more of that good feeling.
I was asking running to carry an awful lot of weight, especially for what was essentially a frivolous pursuit. I was never going to be a good enough to make a living at running. Letting it take over my life was not a long-term solution. But in the short term, I was still grabbing for more and it was paying off.
I wanted to get in more of my long runs on trails, so in January I began to drive to Topsfield on Sundays for long runs with GAC. Their runs were typically on trails through the local parks and forests. I had usually avoided driving to training runs before, starting all my runs from my front door with few exceptions. Using a car to run just seemed wasteful. But now that I wanted more, every Sunday I drove about 30 miles to Jim Gilford’s store (he’s the "Gil" in GAC) in Topsfield to meet with the group for a run.
There were a lot of experienced ultrarunners in GAC, so I was able to learn from their stories. My own training and goals didn’t seem unusual to them. After the run, we retired to the store basement. Gilly kept a keg of beer there so we recovered with beer, poker, and conversation.
Then I would drive into Boston to run a few more miles and drink more beer with the Boston Hash. Most Sundays, that was all I’d do – run and drink.
It was now 2005, and I only had half a year left to finish getting ready for Vermont. I began to pile on the long runs. On Jan. 8, I ran the GAC Fat Ass 50K in 5:24. Three weeks later, I ran 35 miles by myself on Saturday and 17 on Sunday with Boston’s L Street marathon training group. A week after that, I ran the 16-mile Boston Prep race in Derry, and the following weekend I ran 17 miles on Saturday and 19 (and a hash) on Sunday.
Three more 20-mile runs, and then in mid-March I left the New England snow behind and flew to Virginia on a business trip. That weekend I drove my rental car to Maryland. There, I met up with a group from GAC that had driven a van down from Massachusetts and we ran the HAT Run 50K. I had a great run in the pleasant spring weather, saw some deer along the trail, and finished in 4:56 without any undue strain.
I had one more big effort planned before Vermont. Back in January, registration opened for the Bull Run 50-Mile Race. I had to decide whether I was going to enter so I could get in before the race filled up. I needed the race as a training run, and I could arrange my business travel to put me in Virginia that week. But Bull Run was the week before Boston, and I wanted to keep my streak of consecutive Boston Marathons going. I decided to enter both races and see how that worked out. I wouldn’t run either race fast, but it’s not like I was going to win either of them anyhow.
So on Saturday, April 9th, I drove from DC to Clifton, VA for the Bull Run. It was a sunny 70 degrees and the early spring trees didn’t provide much shade, so I finished with a bit of a sunburn. My time of 9:49 was a new 50-mile PR. That was pleasant, but since there were no mountains, mud, or snow on the course and long trail races aren’t measured all that accurately, I didn’t make too much out of shaving two minutes off my PR. I didn’t have any problems that would keep me from running Boston.
I didn’t want to just sit in my hotel after the race. There wasn’t much to do in the area, but there’s always a bar around, so I went out for a beer that night. The bar was empty, so I only stayed for one beer, but my legs were sore from the race so I was staggering when I walked out of the bar. That attracted the attention of a cop who must have figured from the way I was walking that I was drunk. He followed me to my car in his cruiser, and then trailed me as I drove very carefully back to my hotel.
I took a few days off to recover, and then I ran 4 miles at Khoury’s on Thursday night, followed by a few beers to get me ready for a weekend of pre-marathon hashing. Every year the Boston hash puts on a weekend-long celebration as a counterweight to Patriot Day’s big race. I joined in for Friday night’s pub crawl, and then I ran the 6 miles of the official Marathon Hash on Saturday, with copious beer during and after the run.
On Sunday, I skipped the hash activities and went to the marathon expo to pick up my number. At the expo, I stopped by the Saucony booth to check out the three-foot poster of myself hanging on their wall. Saucony was running an ad campaign at major races called the "Sacuony 26". They picked 26 runners with interesting stories to represent the company, one for each mile. Many of the stories involved running with injuries or illnesses, but they found my story of running a 50 the week before Boston interesting enough to include me in the group. For participating, I got a complete Saucony running outfit, which I had to wear during the race, $10 per mile, which I planned on donating to the Vermont 100 charity, and entry for me and a guest to a post-race party at a bar overlooking the finish line.
Marathon Monday was a nice day for a run. The sun came out as the day went on, but it never got too hot. I was busy with ultramarathoning so I hadn’t qualified, which meant I was running with one of the numbers the BAA gives to SRR for helping out at their events. That meant I started in the back of the pack with the charity runners and other non-qualifiers. I was so far back that it took me over 20 minutes to reach the starting line after the gun went off.
It was a good thing that I wasn’t trying to race. Because of my starting position I spent the whole race weaving through crowds of slower runners. I kept the spirit of the hash weekend going with a few beer breaks along the way. My first beer was at about mile 6, when I stopped in the Happy Swallow in Framingham. The patrons there bought me a beer and took a few pictures. The next day, the Framingham paper mentioned me as "the mystery runner" in a brief note in their marathon story. My next beer was at mile 20, where the Boston hash has their beer check. It’s like a water stop, only they hand out beer to anyone who wants some, instead of water. I had one more beer before the finish, from a can donated by a spectator at mile 21, near Boston College.
The running itself was uneventful. At the pace I was going, I felt no ill effects from the previous weekend’s 50 miler. As I approached the finish line, I caught up with Gilly, who was continuing his yearly tradition of running Boston as a "bandit," and we crossed the finish line together with the clock reading 4:10. My chip time, which didn’t include the time lost at the start, was 3:48.
I stopped by the Saucony party at the finish line, where I had a couple more beers. I picked up my poster from the expo booth for a memento. Then I headed over to a nearby pub for the hash post-marathon/post-weekend party and one more beer, but by that point we were all ready to wind things up for the weekend.
My poster and I rode home on the bus. I was tired but happy with the results of my experiment. Both the Bull Run and Boston had gone well, and my confidence was sky-high. I was dreaming about bigger things that I’d heard about from my friends at GAC and on the Internet – running some of the other major ultras like Western States or Hardrock, or maybe even moving up to harder challenges, like the Grand Slam (four mountain 100s – Vermont, Western States, Leadville, and Wasatch Front - in a single year) or Coyote4Play (a weekend of multiple 40 mile+ runs, mixed in with beer, bowling, and other foolishness).
But first, I had to finish getting ready for Vermont. In early May, I ran 33 miles at the GAC Mother’s Day 6 Hour. On Memorial Day weekend, I ran 11 miles with my friend Mark on Saturday, participated in the Burlington hash’s marathon pub crawl that night, ran from my hotel to the start of the Vermont City Marathon Sunday morning, ran the marathon in 3:35 (including a short stop at the mile 23 beer check), had a beer at the post-race festival and ran back to my hotel, and ran the marathon hash later that afternoon, for a total of 33 miles on the day.
June 5 was the Nipmuck Trail Marathon in Connecticut. I carpooled down with a group from GAC. The advertising for the race says, "If you don't have health insurance don't do this race. No matter how careful you are, plan on falling." They were right. I’ve seen plenty of runners hit the wall in a marathon, but Nipmuck was the only race I’ve been in where I saw another runner crash headfirst into a tree. It was a hot day, and I ran my slowest marathon ever, a 5:47, but I had to sit and shiver for 20 minutes after the race before I could get up and walk around.
After Nipmuck, I felt invincible. I thought I was ready to do great things in Vermont, relative to my personal scale for success. I wasn’t expecting to win, of course, but I was now expecting to meet my goal of finishing Vermont in less than 24 hours. But as most models of addiction show, this feeling of confidence is just the prelude to a crash.
Between all the long runs, I was jumping into shorter races to spend some time with my SRR friends. On June 12, I ran the Battle of Bunker Hill 8K on a hot day in Charlestown. My back was sore afterwards, but that wasn’t unusual. I sat down on the ground to talk for a while. When I stood up, it felt like someone had jabbed a knife in my lower back. Hunching over helped some, but the pain returned every time I tried to straighten up.
I grabbed some ice from a nearby cooler and applied it to my back. The pain ebbed after a while, and I was able to stand up and walk around without wincing. A day later, I continued my training, but now it seemed like there was a little extra heaviness to my legs. My certainty that I could run forever began to erode.
I had one last long run scheduled before Vermont. Every year, Joe Hayes organizes a training run on Mt. Agamenticus in York, ME. The course is a 3-mile loop that goes up and down the mountain, an abandoned ski area. Joe holds the run on the same day as Western States, which was on June 25 in 2005.
I rode up with Jeff Washburn and some others from GAC. It was another hot and sunny day. The uphill portion of the trail was in the open on flat rocks, and the sun turned the rocks into a frying pan. The rest of the course was nice and shady, heading downhill on a dirt trail, and then looping around the base of the mountain on a road to get back to the climb. I planned on doing ten loops, but I stopped after nine, telling myself that in the heat, and with only three weeks before Vermont, that was more than enough.
The next day was one last race, the POW-MIA 10K in South Boston. My time on the flat course was only 45:02, but it was another extremely hot day, so I blamed the weather and put the race behind me to start tapering for Vermont.
I had enjoyed the last year of training in large part because I had a lot of success without a lot of pre-race stress, since I was treating every race like just another training run. But it seemed like instead of avoiding stress, I had just been saving it all up for now. Sometimes I can enjoy the break from training while I taper, but when it’s an important race, it’s hard for me to manage my tension without the release of running. I had gone through this before with marathons while trying to qualify for Boston, but this time the potential reward and the associated risk were much larger. I wasn’t sleeping well, my legs felt tired, and I worried that I wasn’t recovering well enough to be fresh on race day.
I drove to Vermont for the race. I hadn’t been able to get a room at the hotel I stayed at in 2004, and that took a little more from my comfort level. At race registration, I turned in the money I’d collected for VASS, about half of what I had collected in 2004. I returned to my hotel, skipping most of the pre-race activities in a last-ditch effort to rest before the race.
My attitude going into the race was dramatically different from the previous year. In 2004 I wanted to finish, but I wasn’t afraid of failing. Mostly, I was curious. I was there to find out what I could do. For 2005, I had done a lot more preparation, Mark and Karen were there to crew for me again, and I had Gilly lined up to pace me through the last 30 miles. I knew the race would be hard, and I was anxious about failing. I felt that if I didn’t buckle, I would have wasted all my work and let my friends down. By this point, my faith in my training had almost disappeared. A feeling of dread hovered over everything, and I just wanted to get the race over with.
My memories of race day are mostly a blur. At the start, it was uncomfortably warm and sticky. Soon after dawn, the temperatures rose well into the 80s, another in a long string of hot and humid days. I should have adjusted my plan and walked a lot more during the day to take it easy. Then, if I made it through the day, I could have made an attempt to make up time towards buckling at night. Instead, I stubbornly went ahead with my original plan, in the blind hope that things would work out. The results were not good.
In 2004, I averaged about 12 minutes per mile for more than 50 miles before I began to slow down. In 2005, by the time I reached 30 miles I had already fallen off pace. My back hurt, my hamstrings hurt, and I was throwing up every time I tried to eat anything. Even the liquid food substitute I had trained with wasn’t staying down. At about 40 miles, I stopped and lay down in a roadside stream to make one last attempt to cool off, recover, and go on. After a few minutes, I was able to get up and trudge on, but I still must have looked horrible, because other runners were asking me if I was OK as they passed me.
One of the runners told the crew at the aid station at mile 41 about me and they sent a truck back to see how I was doing. When the driver stopped and asked me if I needed to drop out, I gave it some thought. I didn’t want to give up. But I was tired, hot, nauseous, in pain, and I still had 60 miles to go and no reason to believe things would get any better. I had already gone through a race’s worth of suffering in 2004 just to finish. If I wasn’t going to buckle, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through all that again. I got in the truck.
I was quiet during the ride to the aid station, trying to sort out my feelings. In the short term, dropping out relieved all the pressure I was feeling. I might have failed, but I no longer had to deal with the stress of trying to buckle. I could relax for the first time in weeks. Dropping out also ended the worst of the immediate physical suffering.
On the other hand, as the discomfort ebbed, it got harder for me to justify dropping out. I had spent years working towards this day, and I didn’t even get halfway to my goal before I gave up. I took pride in my ability to push myself to keep going, and I knew that today I hadn’t pushed things to the bitter end. Quitting before I was forced to may have been the wise choice, but I would never know what would have happened if I had stayed in the race. Maybe I could have pulled it together. There were still 60 miles to go, plenty of time to make up what I had lost.
When we got back to the aid station, I had things I needed to do before I could leave the race to lick my wounds, both literal and metaphorical. I found Mark and Karen and told them that we were done for the day. Before we could leave I had to find someone from GAC to pass the message on to Gilly that I wouldn’t be there to meet him for the end of the race. While I was looking, I came across Steve Burton and Nancy Given from SRR, who were in Vermont for the USATF Grand Prix race that weekend and had taken a side trip to cheer for me as I went by. I was happy to see them, but embarrassed by the news I had to share. I ended up spending a half-hour wandering around the aid station, talking about why I dropped out, when all I really wanted to do was escape from the scene of my failure.
It was a hard day for everyone. Only about half of the runners at the start made it to the finish, and the winner’s time was more than an hour slower than in 2004. None of that made me feel any better about dropping out.
When I ran my first 100 in 2004, I thought I had learned what I needed to know about how hard it was to finish. I thought I was ready to take the next step and run 100 miles as a race. In retrospect, I realized that I had been fortunate in 2004, and that my limited success that year had made me over-confident. Now I’d been reminded yet again that there are always things out of my control that might adversely affect my results in a race. I had to ask myself if I really wanted to spend the time it would require to try again. I had gotten frustrated with running marathons for time, after repeated problems with injuries and weather. Now the same problems were occurring in ultras.
I didn’t know if I made another attempt at a 100-mile race with a time goal whether I would deal with the stress any better. The cost in time and effort of preparing for each shot at an ultra was much higher. The rewards for success were greater, but they never seemed to be enough. Every new success left me wanting more. And the risks of failure mounted with every reach for more.
It wasn’t like I could just jump into another 100 the next week. There weren’t that many to choose from. I would have to wait at least another year to try Vermont again, or I’d have to go to a race that was less convenient and more expensive to get to.
In the meantime, since I had "only" run 40 miles, I was able to spend the rest of my week in Vermont drowning my sorrows in beer, non-competitive running, and general foolishness. The Wednesday after the race, I ran with the hash in Burlington. That weekend, I went to a campground in Swanton for the Burlington hash’s yearly invitational event. After three days of beer, grilling, running through fields, woods, and leech-infested swamps, pudding wrestling, some naked and semi-naked running, and more beer, I started to put Vermont behind me.
That was the start of a pattern. I would rest, filling up my spare time with drinking, and then when I thought I was back on track I’d build up my training, enter a race, and get injured. I would run through that cycle over and over again, equally dedicated to running and drinking, using beer to wash away my frustration with my running.
In August, while I was still recovering from Vermont, I almost died at a hash in Natick. We had just gotten started and I was searching for the trail when I was stung multiple times by wasps. I ran on, but I began to feel odd and I started to fall behind the pack. My friend Donna looked at me and saw that I had broken out in hives, so she stayed with me. We figured that I was allergic to the stings. That came as a surprise to me since it wasn’t the first time I’d been stung.
We slowed to a walk and decided that since we weren’t too far from the main road, we should try to get to a drugstore to buy some antihistamine. Before we made it to the road, my vision started to get blurry. A short time later, I fell to the ground. The last thing I remember before I passed out from anaphylactic shock was Donna standing over me, trying to get someone with a cell phone to stop and call 911.
The next thing I knew there were EMTs standing over me. They had just connected a Benedryl IV. That helped me recover enough so they could load me in the ambulance and take me away. I spent an afternoon at the hospital under observation, but I made it back to the hash in time to drink a down-down at the post-run party for "short-cutting trail in an ambulance".
The incident almost got me a new hash name, but everyone was used to "Boner," and "Prophylactic Shock" was hard to say after a few beers.
My back was still bothering me as I tried to get back to regular training. That put a limit on the amount of running I wanted to do. I didn’t feel ready to gear up for another ultra. I knew that speedwork was the last thing my back needed, so trying to race against my younger self in shorter races was out. That option didn’t really excite me that much anyhow.
I entered a few races, basically living off my previous training for the ultra. That left plenty of time for going out hashing or heading to a bar for a drink with no need to worry about whether it would affect my next run. A few times I had to deal with getting my car fixed after minor incidents on the way home, but I decided not to let that worry me.
In January 2006, it was make-or-break time. My fitness was fading away. Either I was going to start running long again, or I was going to give up. I decided to try a 30-mile run. I managed to run the entire distance, but I probably shouldn’t have. Well before I was done, and even with plenty of ibuprofen, my back on fire. After that run, even I realized that I would have to cut back. That left even more time for drinking.
I was also spending time in the dating pool. The women I was dating had a tough time making an impression on me through my drinking, distaste for work, and regret about the limited amount of running I could manage. But I got lucky. In March, I went on my first date with Ruth Sespaniak. Ruth and I had met online, and in one exchange I mentioned that I was going to see "Spamalot," the musical based on the movie comedy "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Ruth told me she was interested in it. I happened to have an extra ticket, so I asked Ruth if she wanted to go and she said she did.
At the time, I was managing a group that provided computer support within my company. Part of my job was to call people who had given us low ratings on service requests. One of the requests was from a "Ruth Sespaniak," and when I looked up her picture in the company directory, it matched the picture of the person I had met online. So I was very interested to follow up on this particular request, and very relieved to talk to her and find that she seemed like a normal person. At the end of the call, I told her I had one more question for her. I surprised her by asking if she was going to see Spamalot that Friday. She was surprised again to learn that she was going with me!
The day after our first date, I managed to get stopped in Vermont for a DUI (Driving Under the Influence) after a long day of hashing and celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. That forced me to slow down for a little while, but soon I was back in the bars and on the trails with the hash.
For some reason Ruth stayed with me, and we were soon seeing each other regularly. Often on days when we didn’t have something going on, we’d still see each other at morning in the gym at work. That helped me make it through the long, uninspiring day to follow.
My back pain continued and began to interfere with more than just running. I was having problems sleeping because my back hurt when I lay in certain positions. After visiting a number of different doctors without any success, my insurance company authorized an MRI, which showed some degeneration in a disc in my lower spine. I went to a pain management clinic, where the doctor thought that there might be some extra pressure on some of the spinal nerves near the problem disc. He did a "lumbar facet radiofrequency denervation" to deaden them. Basically, the doctor stuck needles in my spine and ran an RF signal through them to burn out the nerves.
The operation helped reduce the pain, and soon I was able to start building my mileage up again. By April 2007, I had extended my long runs back to more than 20 miles at a time. As always, I wanted to set a goal to test myself against. I still didn’t feel 100 percent physically, and even if I did, I wasn’t mentally ready to go back to ultramarathons. Instead, for lack of anything better to do, I signed up for the Marine Corps Marathon in October. I did some long runs to prepare, but I didn’t really take the race seriously. I was now over 45, so my Boston qualifying time had gone up to 3:30. After all the ultras, I was arrogant enough to think that Marine Corps was "only a marathon," and I figured that I could run a 3:30 without too much effort.
Just before the marathon, I got another DUI. This time I totaled my car. Luckily, I wasn’t hurt in the accident and I didn’t hit anyone else.
It was a turning point. That night was the last time I had anything to drink. I realized that if I kept on the way I was going, I could lose much more than a race. The state forced me to go through an alcohol abuse treatment program, which helped give me a new framework to build on. I keep a picture of my totaled car in my wallet to remind me of what could happen if I slip.
As much as anything else, my relationship with Ruth helped sustain me through the changes I had to make. We were working on something together that meant more than another drink. That process never stops – we’re still working on it today.
I was just starting to deal with the fallout from the second DUI when I went to Virginia for the marathon. There were about 30,000 other runners with me at the start, near the Pentagon. It was a beautiful day, not warm or humid as it often is in Northern Virginia, even in October. I was enjoying the surroundings as I ran across the Potomac, through Georgetown, and by all the monuments. At 19 miles I was on track to finish under 3:20. It appeared I would get away with thinking the race was "only a marathon". Then my left calf cramped up. That reduced me to shuffling along at about 11 minutes per mile while hundreds of runners streamed past me. I finally crossed the finish in 3:41.
It took a month for my leg to improve enough to let me run again. I probably should have taken more time, but failing in a marathon had hurt my pride even more. I had quit drinking, but I didn’t magically become a different person. My running was still mired in a damaging addictive cycle. I needed to run to feel good about myself.
I was getting more fun from watching Ruth run than I was getting from my own running. She used to run in school, but had let it slide, spending her time hiking, kayaking or cross-country skiing instead. When Ruth started dating me, she realized that if she wanted to spend more time with me, she was going to have to get back into running.
After she started to run, Ruth found she wanted to stick with running for her own sake. She could feel herself getting fitter, losing weight, and learning to run farther and faster. Watching Ruth reap the rewards reminded me of how I felt when I first started running. I was happy I could share that with her.
Ruth decided she wanted to run a half-marathon in February 2008, so I signed up to keep her company. It was only a half-marathon, after all. But I had calf problems again, so I dropped out at about mile 11 and hitchhiked to the finish. That was another minor embarrassment. I used to take pride in always finishing races, no matter what. Dropping out in Vermont had been traumatic for me. Sure, it was a 100-mile race, and more than half the people who started that day dropped out, but quitting was something I just didn’t do, no matter what. Once that barrier was broken, it didn’t seem as important any more for me to limp to the finish if a race wasn’t going well. I told myself that it was sometimes best to give up and try again another day, but that still didn’t sit well with me emotionally.
After the half-marathon I gave up on racing hard for most of the year. That left me feeling a little empty, but my relationship with Ruth was making up for it. In April we reached the point where we decided to make it permanent, and we got engaged.
I entered some races but treated them more as fun runs or ways to spend time with my friends. I ran a marathon while Ruth and I were in California in May, and later that month I ran Vermont City again to support my friend (and ultra crewperson) Mark while he ran his first one.
One consequence of sobriety was that I didn’t have drinking as a crutch to help me make it through another unrewarding day at work. Neither I nor my employers liked the results. My job was hanging by a thread through the summer. It was clear that they were looking to let me go. I finally lost my job early in September 2008. That wasn’t a good thing, but it was still something of a relief when it happened.
Soon afterwards, Ruth and I had our wedding. We didn’t let my unemployment get in the way of starting off our married life right. Our wedding was outdoors at Kimball Farm in Westford, MA. Along with the ceremony, we had a barbecue, ice cream, and some outdoor fun with our friends and family. One of our friends from SRR, Dan Solomon, got a Justice of the Peace license for the day so he could preside at our wedding. Everyone had a wonderful time. There was a lot of rain on our wedding day, but that just added a little extra water to the splashing from the bumper boats.
The next day our wedding party joined Ruth and me in a 5K. We ran wearing t-shirts that labeled us "bride" and "groom". Then we packed our running shoes and kayaks and headed off to Cape Cod for our honeymoon.
Through all this I was building my weekly mileage back up again. It was a Sisyphean task, but it’s what I do. Now that I had lost my job, I had even more time for running. By the end of 2008, I was regularly hitting 40 miles per week and had a couple of weeks where I reached 60 miles, something I’d never done before unless 30 or more of the miles were coming from a single long run.
That got me to thinking about goals again. Running within my limits wasn’t enough for me. I still needed to push against those limits and get my racing fix. I told myself that training for a fast marathon wouldn’t be too much for me to handle. I was putting in plenty of miles, so I figured all I needed to do was add a little speedwork and I’d be set to go.
I decided that my first step would be to start going to SRR indoor track workouts. I avoided them in the past because I always seemed to break down when I ran track, but I knew that if I wanted to run a fast marathon, I needed to find a way to add some speed to my running. Ruth was going to track, and it seemed like a good way to spend more time with her and my SRR friends.
I started track early in December. By the end of December I was having intermittent sharp pains in my back. By the middle of January, my left calf hurt again. I declared the experiment with track over, only a month-and-a-half after it started.
Ruth was still growing steadily as a runner. She was ready to try a longer race, so in March 2009, we entered the Eastern States 20 Miler. Race day was miserable. The temperatures were just barely above freezing, and we ran the whole race in a cold rain. There were 20 mph winds coming from the North. Luckily, they were tailwinds for most of the race, so we didn’t feel their full effect until we were standing outside after the race in our heavy, wet gear.
I cruised along at well under a 7:30 pace for about 12 miles. Then I started to slow down. I figured I was just out of racing condition, but it was more than that. By the last couple of miles, I was struggling to drag myself along under 9 minutes per mile. I managed to hold on and finish just under 2:30, but after the race I had some back pain and my hamstrings felt tighter than usual.
The back pain ebbed after some rest, but my legs never regained their spring. I developed a case of "runner’s butt," a persistent pain where my left hamstrings attached to my hip. When my hamstrings tightened with each step forward, they tugged painfully on the area that hurt. I was reduced to a gait where all I could do was use my left quadriceps to flip my leg ahead of me so I could slowly limp along.
Finally, even I understood that I had to shut things down. I cut my mileage way back in April and started going to physical therapy for the pain. It took until October before I could get back to running 20 miles per week on a semi-regular basis. The runner’s butt didn’t disappear, but it receded enough to let me run, and I learned how to manage the residual pain to keep it from increasing while I started building up my mileage yet again.
I lost a lot of my fitness while I was going through therapy. Those six months were the longest break I’d taken from running since I began in 1992. It had been a long time since 10 miles was a long and hard run for me. Ramping my mileage up again was almost like going back to my time as a novice distance runner. I found it interesting, if not always fun, to have to push myself to extend my long run to 12 or 15 miles. I’d forgotten how a Saturday morning 15-mile run could be difficult, and how even that distance could leave me drained and wanting a nap afterwards.
But I persevered, and by February 2010 my weekly mileage was back into the 30s and my long run was up to 18 miles. Ruth was needed to fill out the SRR women’s master’s team at a hilly USATF-Grand Prix 10-mile race in Amherst, so off we went. The result? My left calf went out again. The rock rolled back to the bottom of the hill.
Ruth also had a sore hamstring after Eastern States. She took a break, got it taken care of, and when she felt completely better, started running again. In 2010, while I was struggling, she was training for her first marathon, injury-free. Maybe stubborn denial isn’t the way to go after all.