The heart of a crewperson

Beat halted in the middle of the trail. The forest was black, with the jungle canopy masking the moonlight and blotting out the starry sky. The air was as thick as hot chocolate, oozing down my lungs like warm syrup. The trail was just as sticky, coated in a thin layer of dew-saturated mud that grabbed your shoes and sent them skidding toward the dark oblivion of the forest. Beat didn't say anything. His head continued to face forward, held slightly limp by his drooping shoulders. I stood behind him and waited for a reaction. I expected him to tell me his feet were killing him or his legs were tired or he too was choking on this wretched humidity. But the silence lingered. Finally, I said, "Are you asleep?"

A small cough. "Um ... no ... I don't think so."

To figure out where you are, sometimes you have to go back to the beginning. My first trip to Hawaii also came about because of the HURT 100. It was January 2009, and I was vacationing and crewing with my then-boyfriend, Geoff. Several of the people at this year's race even remembered me as the chick on the bicycle, showing up at aid stations in my bicycle shorts and and helmet, refilling gel bottles and disappearing back into the night. I wasn't such a good crew-person back then. I was more concerned with putting miles on my rented road bike as a training ride for the Iditarod Invitational. I spent the day and night pedaling around the steep hillside neighborhoods of Honolulu, and I missed more checkpoints than I made. Geoff won that race. Even though he would spend the rest of the week in Hawaii firmly planted on his sleeping pad in sheer exhaustion, he didn't act too worn out at the time. I asked him what the HURT 100 was like. "Kind of like running in Juneau, but hot," he replied. And I just smiled, because I thought I understood, but I didn't have a clue.

So when I returned with Beat, I had a lot of conflicting memories of this place. The crowded streets, the terrifying traffic, the checkpoints that smelled strongly of ramen and faintly of vomit, and of course the strange dynamic surrounding my role in it all. In every major ultrarunning race, there are organizers, runners, volunteers and crew. Organizers get the financial benefit, runners get the glory and volunteers get the appreciation. Only crew, the lowly masses who follow one particular runner around, are truly nobodies in a race. We wait in the shadows, chat quietly with the volunteers, refill a few bottles, hug our sweaty smelly runners, travel to the next checkpoint, and we wait. And wait. Nobody even notices we are there, waiting, unless perhaps we are wearing funny bike clothes.

Beat and I woke up at 4 a.m. Saturday, prepped the rest of our gear, and drove to the race start at a nature center nestled beneath the green cliffs of Oahu. I saw him off at the 6 a.m. start and then headed back to the hotel for the first order of duty, which was to help register Beat for the 2011 Tor des Geants, since registration was likely to close later that day. Thanks to Web site difficulties this simple chore turned into a three-hour exercise in futility, complete with frantic messaging with Beat's mother in Germany. Defeated, I got back up to meet him at the end of his first 20-mile loop.

He made good time on lap one, and I barely caught him as I climbed back up to the nature center. Beat didn't look too fresh as he walked toward me. His hair was drenched and his legs were covered in mud. "It's really slick out there, really hard," he said ominously. He told me of the slippery roots and rocks that added another layer of difficulty to the already steep and technical trail. His eyes were glazed with fatigue and his skin looked soft boiled. "I only have to make it to the 100K mark to get my 500-mile jacket. Maybe I can just stop there."

"You can do whatever you want," I said, knowing full well that wasn't what he wanted to do.

The checkpoints cycled on. There were three for each loop — Paradise at mile 7.5, Jackass Ginger at mile 13, and the start/finish at mile 20. Beat mostly didn't need my help but I tried to be there for every one. I watched him arrive struggling but leave perked up. I bonded with other anonymous crewpeople. Chris from Ontario was a brand-new runner, like me. His partner, Charlotte, was a seasoned ultrarunner who competed in at least a dozen big races every year. He showed me the spreadsheet of the exact times she expected to hit each checkpoint. He said she trained very specifically and like to keep order in her running. She never seemed to be able to eat anything, though, and he still didn't know what to do about her nutritional needs. He had stopped at the store to buy Twix bars and wrapped a few hot dogs in foil for good measure. "I don't know if she'll eat any of it," he said sullenly. "But I have to at least try to get her to." I saw in Chris's eyes the kind of devotion that defines a good crewperson. The kind of person who is content to stay up all night, neglecting his own needs in order to coax calories into a grumpy runner who's aching and exhausted and is more likely to snap at him than thank him.

Around 1 a.m., Beat ran into the nature center to finish lap three. He was already at mile 60, having moved beyond fatigue into more of a shellshocked state, which made him seem unusually subdued at the checkpoint. The plan was for me to pace him for lap four, which was more for my benefit than his — he wanted me to have an adventure — but the overnight nature of the loop did give me the opportunity to serve the standard role of the pacer, which is to keep a runner company and keep them moving. If I look tired, it's because I was. It was 1 a.m. and I was about to only start running. Beat and I had a long night in front of us. We started up the trail, breathing the thick, warm air, pressing our feet into the slick trail and feeling them slide back with every labored step. As the trail jutted skyward, there were more roots and rocks, more dark lumps to crawl over and around. This is the true evil of the HURT 100 — it's not a posh 100-miler in Hawaii in January. It's not just 100 miles. It's 100 miles of technical singletrack, climbing and descending 25,000 feet on an seemingly endless and maddening loop, amid temperatures that northerners can scarcely deal with during the winter - 65 to 80 degrees, with 92 percent humidity. It cuts you down slowly and painfully with blisters and bruises, blood and dehydration. One might say it's the lucky ones who twist their ankles and can drop out with a clear conscience. In the end, only 28 percent of the people who started the 100-miler would finish it.

Beat was not very talkative. I told him stories about hiking in Juneau — because the trail did remind me of Juneau — and tried to dream up stories from my childhood to stash away for future lulls in the conversation. But I don't think he was listening anyway. He was falling asleep on his feet, talking only about maybe stopping at the 100K mark, the next checkpoint. "You can do what you want," I said. "But I'd really love to see the whole course. Maybe think about doing this one lap with me." I figured if I could coax him to mile 80, he'd have to finish the race.

The night wore on in the way ultra-nights do, in that strange, watery place between sleep and consciousness. The lights of Honolulu glimmered whenever the forest canopy opened up. Birds chirped and squawked. Unseen streams gurgled beside us. Roosters darted across the trail. Headlights bobbed in the darkness. Runners ran past saying things like "Good job" and "You're doing awesome." Other runners hunched over the trail, coughing and vomiting. We climbed and descended, slipped and slid. Even after a mere 10 miles, the technical nature of the trail was wearing on my nerves. I'm not a skilled runner just yet and I don't have the sure-footed stride of many people out there. I was flailing over the rocks, clutching to ropes and sweating profusely down climbs that I had been able to breeze up. I was struggling but I knew that didn't matter. This was not my battle. This was Beat's war. I had to put my problems aside and focus on his needs. This realization was freeing. I was egoless, a crewperson, nobody. I had no place here, only a fleeting presence. A ghost in the night. The thought suddenly made me feel light on my feet. If Beat could run 80 miles on this brutal course, I could certainly run 20. And if I in any way could help him achieve this daunting goal, that was an awesome reward.

The sun rose and brought with it the brilliant views that I had been missing through the night. But in a way, a strange way not like me at all, I didn't really care about the scenery. I was watching Beat, watching his feet as they shuffled along the trail, imagining his struggle and fight against the pain, silently trying to remind him much it will mean to him to finish this race despite the hardships. We reached mile 80 and I asked if I could do one last leg with him. He seemed excited about that, and it made it more than easy to ignore my aching legs and sweat-drenched skin and sleepiness. In the end I would do my own 27 miles of the HURT 100, but as an egoless crewperson it felt effortless, because it was effortless. In committing to be there for Beat, I had released myself from my own fatigue and pain. The freedom felt incredible.

However, we agreed I should stop there to avoid the very real prospect of injury. I kissed Beat goodbye and took up my place next to Chris. Chris, who had been so friendly the night before, now seemed distant and angry. We drove to the final checkpoint and waited together. And waited. And as the minutes went by, I finally learned that Charlotte had been hurtful toward him. I reasoned that she was tired and in pain, that she was in a bad place, and probably wasn't acting like herself, though I didn't know her. But I also knew that Chris had been up for 36 hours too, that he too was sweaty and tired, and he had doggedly supported her during what could have easily been a fun tropical vacation instead. He should have just given up, he said, and gone home.

"And yet you're still here," I said as Chris unwrapped two Egg McMuffins in preparation for Charlotte's arrival.

Chris sighed. "I'm still here," he said.

Behind every race is an array of stories, backroads, routes that lead us all to the here and now. I thought of my first HURT 100, back in 2009. Geoff hadn't even been unkind to me and I wasn't fully present for him. I was too concerned about riding my bike, about preparing for my big race, about myself. The 2011 HURT 100 was different. The atmosphere was different. The feeling was different. Maybe all I accomplished was keeping Beat from falling asleep on the trail that one time. But it felt like a monumental accomplishment. Definitely worth traveling all the way to Hawaii, staying up for 36 hours, fighting Honolulu traffic, waiting, waiting, and running for 10 hours.

And when Beat strode into the finish line, after 33 hours and 31 minutes of sweating, struggling and suffering, with a huge smile on his face and a big sweaty kiss for me, I couldn't have been more proud of him.

Pictures of the HURT 100

The HURT 100 stands for Hawaii Ultra Running Team, but no one who races the course thinks of the name that way. HURT hurts. By running five laps on a 20-mile course, HURT 100 racers have to cover 100 miles and 25,000 feet of climbing on a course that is 99 percent slick, rooty, technical and steep singletrack, in temperatures in the 80s under 92-percent humidity. The HURT 100 is only in Hawaii by literal location; the bulk of the race takes place in a dank, dark place of pain and fatigue. But it is a beautiful place yet - as green as the most brilliant moments of early spring, punctuated by the chatter of birds and waterfalls, and embraced by a community of truly enjoyable people.

I had the opportunity to participate in a larger spectrum of the experience this year, as a crew-person for Beat, traveling between the checkpoints, then as his overnight pacer, where I ran 27 miles of this brutal course with him between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Sunday. I'll write more about the experience later, but for now I have a bit of time to post pictures. Beat logged his fifth HURT 100 finish and earned his coveted 500-mile jacket in a tougher-than-usual year for this tough race. The finishing rate was only 28 percent. Beat finished 13th out of 120 or so starters.

After a hellishly slick descent over rock jumbles and steep, root-clogged trail, you end up in this place called Paradise.

Mile 40. "I don't really have to go back out there, do I?"

The unwelcome sign at Jackass Ginger aid station.

Beat makes his way up to the aid station as volunteers hang the HURT mascot above the trail.

Stream crossing that must be made a total of 10 times.

Mid-race foot care.

A party at Paradise. Aid stations quickly become a tight-knit community.

Beat and his Mile 40-60 pacer - a 16-year-old aspiring ultrarunner and high school student in Honolulu - approach Paradise after sunset.

Morning finally comes after a long, long night on the trail.

Waikiki from a distance.

The bamboo dungeon of Manoa Flats.

At 33 hours and 31 minutes, Beat finished in 13th place after 100 miles on slick, technical singletrack with 25,000 feet of climbing. His first words: "It ain't no thang."

The difference of a day

Thursday night hike to the University Beacon with Bill, Norman and Josh. We slogged through slush, climbed up the wind-blasted ridge and made futile efforts to balance on the wind crust as tiny shards of ice whipped up around us. During the descent, Bill accidentally stepped off a snow shelf and hyperextended his knee. Suddenly, a simple Thursday night hike became a half-rescue effort. With no police officers in sight, we had to fashion walking aids out of sticks and walk with a pain-stricken Bill as he picked his way down the mountain. At the slower pace, sweat and fingers started to freeze. A reminder that even casual outings have a sharp edge during the winter.

Friday on a jet coasting over the Pacific Ocean for hours, too many hours, landing in the strange and alien land of O'ahu. Beat, being the jet-setting ultrarunner that he is, was signed up for the HURT 100 and let me tag along for a regrettably short weekend trip in Hawaii. I am here to serve the role as crew/pacer. We were up at 4 a.m. to get to the race start. I saw him off in the inky blackness of a low-latitude dawn, and now I'm prepping to spend the day shuttling between checkpoints to help with the race. After 12 or so hours of wending through Honolulu traffic and subsisting on bagels and coffee, I'm going take a quick evening nap if I can manage, then don my own running gear and - if all goes well - join Beat on lap 4. That's at least 20 miles of muddy technical running in heat (at least relative to what I'm used to, 75-80 degrees) and humidity, beginning after midnight and continuing into another inky black dawn.

As I sleepily make my way through Waikiki, I see people sprawled on beach chairs, swimming in clear warm water and bobbing in the gentle surf beneath blue skies. I recognize these scenes as opportunities that I'm squandering, but I no longer view it that way. One of the best parts of getting older has been a real acceptance that I'm not a product of the images and culture I was fed throughout my youth. I don't have to aspire to an MTV bikini body and an idle life of leisure with a glut of useless consumer products. I can travel all the way to Hawaii for three measly days to stay up all night, eat crappy race food and run technical trails in the mud and rain, and maybe not even touch a grain of white beach sand, and not feel bad about it. In fact, I feel pretty good about it. This is my vacation in paradise, and I'm going to live it up.

Weeknight adventures

My foot plunged deep into the dense snow and sunk to my knees. I lifted my leg up and punched in the next, groping for some kind of platform on the weak trail. Frustration crept around the edges of my mired body. I let out a sigh, thick with condensation in the cold air, and looked at the valley ahead. The Rattlesnake Mountains rose like tree-studded fortresses above the narrow canyon. The moonlight cast a bright glow on the snow, infusing the corridor with a depth and texture that was different — but in a way, more brilliant — than daylight.

I turned off my headlamp and took a few more heavy steps. Behind me, my sled floated easy and free on top of the crust — a crust I had mistakenly thought would be strong enough to hold me. Every so often I glanced back to make sure the sled was still upright. It followed me like a faithful pet, its pole wagging like a tail against the tug of my harness. I couldn’t help but laugh, and feel a strange sort of affection for my sled. It held everything I needed to survive out here, here on the edge of the Rattlesnake Wilderness, where a mere five miles of foot travel had taken me out of the city and into the heart of a silent, lonely, wild place. I had a mask to shield my face from cold wind, already near zero degrees and dropping. I had mittens to bring my tingling fingers back to life. I had food to stoke the inner furnace, water in an insulated pouch, and a sleeping bag and pad to rest when I became tired. Stars splattered the narrow strip of sky overhead. The orange glow of Missoula’s lights had faded. We were alone, my sled and me, ready to take on this winter wilderness. But we were missing one crucial piece of gear — snowshoes. Plus, I reminded myself, this was just a training run. And I was clearly not running. Reluctantly, I flipped a wide U-turn and headed back the way I came.

The next evening, I went for a run straight from my downtown office. My micro-spikes crunched on the glare ice of the river path before I veered up the mountain on the Hellgate Trail. Conditions on the snow-covered singletrack were hellish — rock-hard postholes covered in a couple inches of new powder that made it impossible to gauge foot placement. Running was an ankle-twisting, knee-wrenching exercise in futility. Even walking was technical to the point of frustration. Bill caught up to me near the saddle. We agreed to continue to the peak of Mount Sentinel and drop down the ridge. “Can’t be worse than this,” I reasoned.

Nearly all the snow had blown clean off the face of Mount Sentinel, leaving only a base of jumbled rocks protruding from glare ice. On the front side, where the mountain plunges steeply and directly into the city, there are no trees to shield against the heinous Hellgate winds. Strong gales pushed at our backs, carrying a deep and bitter chill despite “warm” temperatures in the teens.

But the larger concern was keeping our balance on the unbelievably slick surface, where even micro-spikes slipped out on the iced rocks. We joked about needing an ice ax and crampons on the same mountain that college students hike up in their Crocs in the summer. We felt like mountaineers. Conditions only worsened as we picked our way down the steep face. The switchbacking “M” trail managed to catch a bulk of the drifted snow, forcing us to either wade through thigh-deep drifts or skitter along the razor-thin edge of the ice-coated trail. Finally we abandoned the trail and dropped straight down the face, taking careful steps on an ice sheen that threatened to send us careening toward University Avenue, several hundred feet directly below, if we slipped.

About 100 vertical feet above the road, two patrol cars with flashing lights stopped in the middle of the street directly below us. Three officers stepped out, shined their lights toward us, and shouted things we could not hear in the roaring wind. “Maybe we’re in trouble because we’re off trail,” I speculated. But the whole scene was confusing. We pointed that we were going to make our way over to the main trailhead. The officers got back in their car and drove there to meet us.

As we skittered down the last of the glare ice, the three officers jogged up the stairs toward us. “Are you OK?” one asked. “We got a call that someone was flashing an SOS signal from the mountain.”

“We’re fine,” Bill answered.

“SOS?” I said. “No. I mean, we had our headlamps on. But we didn’t flash any signals. We came up the mountain a different way and didn’t know the route down was going to be so bad. But we’re fine.”

“Do you have a vehicle nearby?” the officer asked. “Do you need a ride?” The wicked wind whipped up a veritable ground blizzard in the deserted parking lot. The scene looked dire but I couldn’t help but laugh because the danger had been minimal at best.

“We came from town,” I said. “We can just walk back.”

Bill and I started running again and guffawed about the headlamp “SOS” and the grave concern on the faces of our would-be rescuers. We later learned that the information had gone out on the police scanner, the local newspaper took notice, and there was quite a hubbub about two people trapped in a storm on Mount Sentinel.

Who says you can’t have adventures on weeknights?

Pacifica

It was the kind of weekend that just kept getting better. After the 50K race we went out for a celebratory sushi dinner, at this nondescript yet fantastic Japanese place in Mountain View. I'm not a foodie and more often than not feel bewildered about why people make such a big deal out of particular types of food (meanwhile, I just like food ... lots of it ... preferably sugar.) But every so often I eat a meal that truly blows me away, and this was one of them. The kind of beautifully rendered, perfectly nuanced, savory and satisfying meal that you take pictures of, so you can post them on Facebook, so all your friends can wonder what the big deal is anyway.

Then, on Sunday, I woke up and I wasn't sore. I really wasn't. A little stiff in the calves maybe, but no blisters, no shredded quads, nothing. Six hours on my feet — like some of my medium-length hikes in Juneau — used to take a lot more out of me, at a lower level of overall effort. So I took it as a good sign that I am improving my running fitness. Beat and I enjoyed a lazy morning with several cups of cappuccino, complete with latte art, then made our way over to the coast to go hiking.

The more time I spend in the Bay area, the more I realize how beautiful and varied it is despite the urbanization (and although I also don't consider myself a "city person," I admit that San Francisco is quite beautiful and varied as an urban setting, as well.) Pacifica is nestled against the Pacific Ocean and the northern ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It's within 10 miles of the heart of San Francisco, but wending through the towns small streets, you'd never suspect that. We climbed into the hills toward a mountain called North Peak. From the summit, we could see the city skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge. But to the east, a rolling topography of green mountains all but hid the massive human footprint of the East Bay. To the west, there was only an expanse of blue water sparkling in the sunlight.

From the peak we decided to make our way over to an adjacent peak, which — gasp — had no developed trail en route. We followed the faint footprint of an old jeep road, trudged up a loose rocky slope and had to bushwhack the last hundred yards or so. "Who says you can't find adventure in California," Beat proclaimed as we fought all manner of thorny bushes and jagged rocks, and probably brushed up against poison oak, too. A stiff wind blew along the ridgeline, with windchill that dropped the 40-degree air to something that felt decidedly below freezing.

Nine miles and three hours worth of sunshine later, we returned for more tasty dinner (Japanese noodle soup) and a session in the sauna that was more exhausting than the race, but did clear up the last of my racing/hiking soreness. The only flaw in the entire weekend was the plane ride home, complete with the usual air travel headaches. This always-on-the-go lifestyle and relationship has been hard on both of us, but it's more than worth it.

This race that I won

Even though it was only my second official ultramarathon, a mere three weeks after my first, I had ambitious goals for the Crystal Springs 50K. First, after figuring out that I could in fact travel 31 miles without coming down with "hurty foot" (which I will now regard as an official medical term for the condition of a cyclist's feet when they first take up running), I wanted to run a significantly higher percentage of the course than I did in the Rodeo Beach 50K and last half of the Bear 100. Even if it was a 4.5 mph jogging stride as opposed to a 4 mph speed hike, I wanted to emphasize consistency in running, as a test of my running endurance. Secondly, I wanted to improve my downhill stride, and try to relax so I could run with more fluidity and less pain. Thirdly, I wanted to finish with a time closer to the six-hour range — a big jump from my 6:58 in Rodeo Beach. Fourthly, I wanted some sunshine. No way was I traveling all the way to California and being shut out from badly needed vitamin D yet again. And lastly, I wanted to take pretty photos. That was most important. Even if it meant stopping occasionally so they didn't all come out blurry. The day I care more about a race result than the experience itself is the day that ... well ... let's face it, it's just not that likely.

The Crystal Springs 50K was held in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco. I travel to California to visit Beat but the Bay area has the added bonus of ultramarathons nearly every weekend, even in the depth of winter. The weekend weather was extra chilly for the region, with overnight temperatures dropping into the mid-30s and frost forming on the higher hillsides. I dressed in what I thought was appropriate for those temps — tights and a long-sleeve thick polyester shirt, wool socks, hat and gloves, then carried a backpack with extra layers, food and water — because even in organized races I prefer to pretend I'm out for a self-supported training run, even if I end up solely eating peanut butter sandwich quarters and drinking Coke in tiny cups while my backpack dangles uselessly off my shoulders. And of course, the Californians all showed up wearing shorts and T-shirts and carrying a single bottle in their hands. It made me ashamed to call myself a hardy Montanan-former-Alaskan, but I figured it didn't matter. I was there to run my own race.

Things went great for the first 12 miles. I was running consistently, soaking in beams of sunlight where it broke through the fog, and making good time on my mile splits. I found my place in the pack but reeled in a couple of people, including the "girl in the cute plaid shorts ala Danni." Beat stuck with me and told me my pace was pretty hard, and said I should think about dialing it back. But I knew I felt good and I knew I could hold it. Even though I haven't been a runner for very long, I have enough experience in endurance efforts to sense when the bottom might drop out. However, I have a particular grating problem as a runner in the form of inexplicable midsection cramping on descents. Downhill grades cause a sensation that is best described as someone taking a dull knife and stabbing it deep under my rib cage. It's probably related to breathing and at least partly psychological, but when it flares up on long, steep downhills, I become both extremely slow and extremely irritable.

I groaned as I shuffled down the hill. Beat tried to offer suggestions and I got testy with him. He couldn't help but laugh at me. Angry race Jill is not unlike an angry toddler — too irrational and scrunchy-face cute to be taken all that seriously. Meanwhile, toddler gets more and more scrunchy faced and angry until finally she blurts out, "I just want to go into my pain cave. Why can't you leave me in my pain cave?" Beat laughed at loud. "No pain cave for you!" he said in his best "Soup Nazi" accent. I laughed back at the absurdity of the situation and accepted my role in it. I stopped and took four Advil, and over the next seven miles was able to recover my cramp from "searing agony" to "low-level ache" to "not much at all."

At mile 19, I finally perked up and started to breeze along the trail again. I reeled back in the women and a couple guys who had passed me during my sophomore slump. My feet felt light and fast against the strange sensation of running on actual dirt. The final 5-mile singletrack descent was truly fun. My cramp had abated and despite tired legs I picked up some speed, flying through the trees with feeling of effortless freedom, almost like being carried by wheels. The worst part about running is there's no coasting, and every difficult downhill reminds me of that. But if I can dial in a downhill run enough to move freely without pain or fear, it's one of the best feelings.

We strode across the finish line with 6:12 on the clock — not quite as close to six hours as I had hoped, but still a fair improvement on Rodeo Beach. Beat chatted with his friends (he seems to know most everyone in the Greater Bay Area trail running community) and I found my way over to the finisher's food table to make myself a massive turkey sandwich. The sandwich was almost the size of my head and nearly muffled out the race director's announcements from the other side of the pavilion. Then suddenly I heard him say, "Jill ... Horner." That sounded suspiciously like my name. Perhaps I finished third in my age group or something like that. I set down my sandwich and sheepishly walked to the front to see if Jill Horner was in fact me.

The director doled out medals to age group finishers, and then handed me a mug. The mug said, "First Place Finisher." I looked back at the race director, confused. First in what? He must have sensed my confusion because he said, "You're the first woman. Congratulations."

The girl in the cute shorts ... the woman in the black shirt ... there were several females that finished just a few minutes after me. But they were all behind me.

Huh.

Beat, who officially finished one second behind me, jokingly pouted. "I never win anything."

I held the mug in my hands and reasoned with it. It was a small race ... just a few dozen people ... and it was winter when not many people besides Susitna freaks are training with all that much gusto. But I was a Montanan in California, running dirt when I'm used to running on snow, running when I'm used to hiking and cycling, at a distance most people spend months specifically training for. And I won the race.

Maybe I'm not so terrible at running after all. I'll take it.

The art of go slow

Things are starting to come together for the Susitna 100. Beat and I bought our tickets to Anchorage, and shortly after that pressured friends Danni and Steve (who were both on the fence about even starting the race, and still may be) into buying their tickets as well. In my daydreams, we’re a motley foursome of Outsiders banded together, dragging our sleds across the frozen Susitna Valley. In more likelihood, we won’t be able or want to stick together. But either way, the Susitna 100 will be an interesting reunion since I already know a fair number of Alaskan cyclists on the roster. They’ll all have a chance to laugh at me as we cross paths at a pitiably distant point, since the new route is mostly an out-and-back.

I also am finally attempting to put my sled together. I hoped to do it sooner for training purposes, but as usual reality falls short of intentions. The sled I am using belongs to Geoff Roes, and is full of heavy reinforcements intended for use in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, where conditions are much colder and burlier than a typical Susitna race. But since I seem to have a talent for breaking gear, the burly sled should work well for me. I spent more than an hour on the phone with Geoff last night as he described the attachments and explained the different pieces. I failed to string both ropes all the way through the poles, so I didn’t get it completely put together last night, but did manage to squeeze all my Susitna gear inside the cover, and hope to be running with it by next week.

I am also beginning to feel more comfortable as a runner, if only just. I had a few good runs recently that boosted my confidence in both my footing and ability to maintain a more consistent speed over longer periods of time. But when Geoff asked me how my training was going, I instantly felt the need to apologize for my abilities, which are indeed still quite limited for a person aspiring to a 100-mile ultramarathon.

“I’m still low on the learning curve, but I’m improving,” I said. “My biggest issue is confidence. Also I sometimes feel really lousy for no real reason. I have stomach and cramping issues that I haven’t been able to pinpoint yet.”

“Do you ever go out and try to run fast, the kind of runs most people think of when they think of running — on the road?” he asked.

“Actually, no,” I said. “I started out with that yesterday, running 9- and 10-minute miles with the intention of upping the speed, but found myself veering off into the hills, and that turned to 12- and 14-minute miles on the fluffy snow climbs. I find I enjoy that kind of running so much more. It was still good intensity though. 80 to 90 percent for 90 minutes.”

“That’s good,” he said. “You really don’t need any speed for what you’re training for. All that matters is you get out there and put in time on your feet. It’s something I think most runners, even those who run ultras, don’t realize. By speed training, you might get your 9-minute miles up to 8:40. Twenty seconds is almost nothing over 100 miles. But everyone moves slowly when they feel like crap. If you can boost those slow-moving 20-minute miles up to, say, 15 minutes, that’s five minutes a mile. It’s huge, and easier to do. I used to emphasize speed work and all that, but now I just go into the mountains and spend more time running at slower speeds. It’s made the difference between being a pretty good ultrarunner, and being a great ultrarunner.”

It was an interesting insight into Geoff’s training that I never heard before. When we lived together, he spent lots of time running quarter-mile intervals around a high school track, lifting weights at the gym and suffering through all of his long runs on the road, because Juneau trails in the winter are nearly always covered in unconsolidated snow, requiring snowshoes and a walking-speed shuffle. While training for the 2008 ITI, he ran 25 laps around a flat, three-kilometer groomed cross-country ski loop while towing his sled. It was the same day I set out for an incredibly scenic 90-mile Pugsley ride, touring all the beautiful corners of Juneau. From my point of view, Geoff’s training habits required not only a fair dose of talent, but also a serious tolerance for tedious efforts. Which is why I never had any interest in running. It seemed completely unfun.

When I first met Beat, he introduced me to the strategy of (quotes mine) “moving slowly with haste” during an ultrarun. Consistent movement has always been my approach to endurance cycling — it’s achievable, adaptable, offers its own set of challenges, doesn’t demand tedious training blocks, and becomes more and more effective as events get longer. Beat helped me see how I could do the same in an endurance run. That by keeping a steady pace through all of the highs and lows and downright despair of an effort, I could achieve distances that before seemed to me to be all but impossible. And I was intrigued, because in my view running long distances is the purest form of physical activity, and allows for the greatest access to mountain and backcountry terrain (the less gear you rely on, the less restricted you are in your movement. Skis are limited to what skis can do. Bikes are limited to what bikes can do. But feet can go nearly everywhere.) And yet I had always viewed my own abilities as woefully inadequate in this regard.

Beat’s “just keep moving” (quotes mine) philosophy really made a lot of sense, and he had the experience and success to back it up. Meeting him was the turning point to switch my views from “running sucks and is hard,” to “running is a great mode of travel (but still hard.)” Which is why it was interesting to hear that Geoff holds a similar philosophy. After all, Geoff is considered an elite in the sport of ultrarunning these days. And he does have speed in his background (I believe he has a 15:10 5K PR, and 4:29-minute mile.) But these days, he chooses to leave that background behind to slog around in the mountains for hours on end — which is also what I really love to do.

And of course, it’s all relative. I probably couldn’t hold Geoff’s “slow” pace for five miles. But his is yet another example I was able to draw on when I went out for a late-evening run shortly after our conversation. I felt great for the first three miles, running “hard” but consistently to lay down some 9-minute miles. Then the wheels fell off, so to speak. I don’t know what happened yesterday — I speculate possible cumulative dehydration, or some food that didn’t agree with me, or possibly a stomach bug — but I became quite ill. I had to stop in the woods twice and decided to cut my run short. I was shuffling back toward home, wracked with painful stomach cramps, when I looked down at my Garmin and saw I was logging an 18-minute-mile pace. “I can do better than this,” I thought. I stopped shuffling and started speed hiking. The stomach cramps began to abate. My digestive system felt more settled. And I upped my pace to 14-minute miles at a much less stressful, more solid and sustainable effort. No, I wasn’t running. But I was moving slowly with purpose. And it worked.