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.” This is what the guy sitting behind me on the bus had said in conversation to some other guy.
Up ahead I could see a pair of guys who took it out faster than I had. When they could hear my quads thumping up behind them, they stood patiently to the side of the trail without looking at me.
“No man,” I said. “I’m good right here.” By this ambiguous phrase, I was telling these guys that I was too much of a coward to walk on my own, and that I needed them as an excuse to slow down.
“Okay,” said the guy.
“Make sure to eat plenty and often,” said the dude further up the trail to the guy in front of me. He shared more tips like he was reading them off of a cereal box. I imagined that he was some sort of coach or mentor or training buddy. Or maybe someone who read lots of ultrarunning blogs. But the guy in front of me was all used up. No amount of motivational energy powder was going to resuscitate him. His plan for the day has collapsed like an ant hill under the blade of a lawn mower.
I found comfort in his complete bodily exhaustion.
I hiked behind them to the top of the hill, then cursed them when they started running. I continued like this, ignoring the repeated warnings issued by my legs, until my watch read “5.06 miles.” That’s when our caravan reached the next caravan of dudes who went out too fast. I lost track of the coach and the guy who was reevaluating things. The leapfrogging and apologizing and watching for the roots that’ll grab your toes helped a few more miles pass by.
We arrived at a road with a slight ascent, and I thanked whatever deity was watching out for me, because there hadn’t been a significant descent in around 8 miles. My useless quads had been spared.
The guys spontaneously huddled into a group. I didn’t want to pass them and then have to worry about walking, and I didn’t want to be bumping their elbows or clipping their heels, either. So I watched from behind as they chose their lines through the rocks.
I got out my phone and took a picture of myself and the trail. The shot captured me staring carefully at the photo-taking button, just like all of my self-taken photos.
Somewhere on the road a woman passed all of us guys. I saw that it was the same woman I had been behind shortly after the race began. I remembered because she had told me, “I take the hills deliberately slow, so pass me if you need to,” and I had said, “this is fine, I typically go out too fast.”
We had had that exchange about 30 seconds before I jumped off of the trail and passed her and ten other runners who I felt were running too slowly. And that was about three minutes before I decided my quads were blown.
This woman—Emily, it would turn out—cruised by me and this group of five or six other dudes like she was late to her departing gate. When she was about half a mile up the road, I decided to follow her. My legs were starting to feel good. There was probably some bruised male ego in that decision.
I caught up to Emily a few miles later, and I learned that her name was Emily and that she’s done this race a bunch of times. I asked in a roundabout way whether I was effed for bombing down that one hill. She was gracious and forgiving. She explained that I would be fine if I took it easy until mile 20, because, she said, the course is mostly runnable from mile 20 or so until the very end. “I think it’s 20,” she said. “Or maybe its 18.” She worked through the details out loud, but I didn’t care because my watch doesn’t measure distance very well on mountain trails.
I decided to come clean and admit that I was barely hanging on. I explained how I was from an area of Georgia that is so flat terrain-wise that the local cross-country coach paid to have 200 tons of clay hauled in so that his team could have a hill to climb. The hill is about 15’ tall. It’s known by all the runners in town as “the hill.”
During another slow ascent I got out my camera for another picture, but I saw that Erica has texted me. It seemed she was out hiking with our dogs and got caught in a downpour. She made it back to our cabin rental, but Ranger—our anxious Pit-Bull dickhead—had run away just as Erica was setting her things down inside the cabin. In the end, Erica and dickhead had to walk barefoot down to the ranger station in the rain to get another key card to the cabin.
“Hope your day is going better than mine,” is what she said in the text.
“Fuck,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” asked Emily. She was ready to help pop my blister or troubleshoot nausea or massage my soleus muscle.
“Just got a message from my wife,” I said. “Things aren’t going to well back at the cabin.”
We spent the next mile talking about anxious dogs, and she shared with me what was, to her and her family, the miracle of doggie CBD, which is an extract taken from the cannabis plant. It has analgesic and calming effects on humans and dogs.
And so on. I followed Emily for another eight miles or so before she dropped me for good. What did it for me was a fallen tree somewhere between miles 20-24. The tree was slick with rain and I slipped on it and felt something in the outer hipnal region tighten into a fist. I did some gentle mobility exercises—think “90-year-old doing Tai Chi Chu’an”—and took it easy for a few miles.
A few miles later I crossed a stream and on the other side smashed the shit out of my toe and said all of the most terrible words that I knew, one after the other, in a meaningless string of shock and frustration. My toe went numb. [A month later and there is a barely perceptible fleck of bruise beneath my toenail.]
Less than a mile later I smashed my knee against a rock. I smashed it just like I always smash my shin against the trailer hitch on the back of my Honda Element. The boulder had a trailer-hitch-shaped knee-high protrusion. I wondered if the race directors had a name for this particular hazard. I told it that it could go fuck itself, and was on my way.
At some point in there I started getting dizzy, which I knew from reading and from experience meant that either my salt was too low and I needed to take a salt pill, or it meant that I was hungry and needed to eat sugar. If I took the wrong thing, then I would get dizzier until I puked—or, because I’m terrified of vomiting, then I would get dizzier and dizzier and eventually faint and then wake up with a concussion and evidence that my fear had been realized. I decided to eat a salt pill.
I got dizzier, so I grabbed a tree and searched frantically in my hip bag for a small fast-food-ketchup-sized packet of sugary gunk. It was Espresso flavored.
That seemed to be what I needed. Only now the salt was kicking in and my mouth was dry. My fingers began to swell. I considered filling up my water bottle in one of the many streams I crossed, but Erica recently got Giardia while visiting India, and I would rather drop out of the race than have what she had for the next two weeks.
I survived. I was grateful for the paved miles that Emily had promised. They were like freebie miles. I kept repeating that to myself, “Freebie miles.” It felt like I was getting to cross off the miles without having to work for them. That’s how unaccustomed I was to running on trails.
I didn’t realize I was at the famed 800’ climb—called “Hells Doorway” or “Satan’s Staircase” or something similar—until I was halfway up it. I just kept taking boulder after boulder thinking, “I bet it’s up ahead.”
I passed two dudes at the top of the climb. I jogged past them at about an 11 minute/mile pace. The fog was so thick at the top of the mountain that I could only see 20 feet in front of me. I had no idea where I was or where I was heading. I just kept following little blue flags on the side of the road—the kind of flags used to mark utility lines.
I passed a second pair of dudes before turning onto still another section of trail. I could just make out a pair of USA-colored running shorts on the trail up ahead. I ran out of trail before I could run them down.
The race course finished about 200’ from our cabin as the sparrow flies. But, in all of that fog, I wasn’t sure how to cut through the woods. Erica drove all around the park and couldn’t find the race finish—again, because of the fog. On an ordinary day she could have seen it out the back window of the cabin.
That night an old friend of mine and his family visited me and Erica, and we all went on a short hike out to Bald Rock. My friend and his family said supportive and encouraging things such as, “You ran how far?” and, “You seem to be moving, like, okay, considering…”
We hiked out to the lookout point where you can see for 10 miles in two directions. Of course, we couldn’t even see the furthermost edge of Bald Rock.
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