View from Grayson Highlands Park Lookout It was mile 16, and I was walking up a paved hill. My race plan had been meticulously developed over the previous weeks, and, up to that point in the race, I had followed it carefully. But I had misunderstood a crucial factor related to endurance exercise: water. Over the first three hours of the race, I over-drank by roughly one pound (500ml or 17 oz) of fluid per hour. I was starting to get dizzy. My hands were swollen. My blood pressure was dropping. At that time, however, I didn’t understand what was wrong. I only knew that I was in trouble. I wondered how long it would take me to get a ride back to the start/finish area in the event that I took another dnf (quit), and I decided that running in the mountains all day was a stupid hobby. Here’s what happened: Some relevant Context: 1. In my only other 50M race (Dam Yeti in Damascus, VA), which was maybe 5 years ago, I had burned up (so to speak) over the first 30 miles and hobbled i
In February of 2023, just four days after turning the chin-graying age of 37, I ran, so to speak, a 31-mile race up to the highest point in Alabama, USA. This is how I remember it. (Note, the language in this report is not suitable for children.) I could feel my quads shudder and buckle against the slightest decline. They were like my arms whenever I overdo it with the free weights and then try to lift a carton of milk. “They’re blown,” I whispered. Running on blown quads is sort of like driving on a flat tire: You’re carrying around a few dozen pounds of useless shock absorber that keeps going, “Thump – Thump – Thump – Thump,” and you’re left wondering how long it will take until you’ve damaged the rim, which, in this metaphor, might be the hips or knees. I stared at my watch. “3.26 miles,” it said, which meant that I still had 28 miles left. And I remembered something I had overheard on the bus to the beginning of the race: “The hardest part of the course was the last three miles.”