Matt Hart's tribute to ultrarunning

UltraRunning from Matt Hart on Vimeo.

SD100: my recap from a race I never ran

Pacing Kirk at SD100 this weekend was one of the most memorable moments in my running career. Well, I did not run all of the 50 miles I was initially supposed to. I joined Kirk at the Aid Station (AS) at mile 50 and DNFed with him at the very next AS at mile 56. It took us 1 hour 55 minutes to cover those 6 miles. We mostly walked it and ran just a bit through some flat sections as Kirk was not feeling good.

This was well after the sunset. The trail was going through canyons. We heard a bunch of coyotes and saw one of those looking at us from the curb ahead of us. We saw a couple of kangaroo rats or some other long-tail rodents. We saw a stripped skunk who was running on the trail 5 steps ahead of us for probably 3 minutes before he decided to turn left and give us the way. The trail was well marked with green glowing sticks we could see on the dark mountain slopes well ahead of us. The moon was too young to outshine any of the bright stars that were covering the sky above us. It was one of the most breathtaking pictures I have every seen in my life. Totally magical! I can see it in front of me right now whenever I close my eyes. I wish I could describe what it all looked like but I am no artist.

When we reached AS at the mile 56 Kirk sat down on a chair and, well, I would say collapsed for the lack of a better term. He was just sitting there trembling with his head bent down to his knees. I put on an additional sweat shirt on him, and volunteers wrapped him up in two blankets, helped him to get into a trailer and gave him some hot coffee. None of it really helped. He could not hold a half-full cup not spilling it up all over. Gabor was sitting in front of us in the same trailer. He had had a lot of doubts about whether he should have continued back then at mile 50. He tried and had to DNF at the same AS as us. Gabor told us that when someone gets exhausted like this, body fails to regulate its temperature anymore (is this what they call hypothermia?) and the only way out is to put that person in a car and max out the heater. We did exactly that and it eventually helped.

Well, DNF's are a part of ultra-running. They do not happen only to those that do not run at all. The course was challenging. Everyone seemed suffering a lot. Out of 81 starters only 43 runners managed to finish the race, while 38 had to DNF: 47% DNF rate! It is not Barkley's rate, but is still pretty remarkable considering the fact most of the participants are seasoned ultra-runners!

I met a bunch of people there starting from Lorraine Gersitz, whom I had a pleasure to share the ride to San Diego with, Charlie, who was feeling pretty good and looked fresh probably because he DNSed SD100 this year, Chris, whom I had run with at PCT50 until she lost me having got sick of my running crappiness, Paul Schmidt, who is an amazing ultra-runner with about 100 of hundred milers under his belt and a terrific RD as well, Andy and Catra, who seemed totally relaxed at mile-50 AS as if they were running a local 10K fun race, Vinnie, who was determined to the end and finished the race no matter what, George, whom I could barely recognize as he ran there alone without Leigh this time. There were a bunch of folks whom I unfortunately missed there like Greg, Marisa, Robert and a few others. Congratulations to all participants both to those who victoriously finished this brutal thing, and to those who wisely DNFed it to run another day!

Several photos I made at the mile-42 AS:

SD100-2008

4620 miles, 111 days, 120 degrees and 3 men

Just read a pretty cool article about 3 guys who ran across Sahara Desert, having covered 4620 miles in 111 days: www.runnersworld.com/engle

It almost sounds like running Badwater or MDS everyday for almost 4 months in a row.


...At 5 a.m. the vehicles would rev up and the three runners would begin their journey. For the first 20 minutes, they would walk in an effort to shake off the rust. "By 5:30 we'd be running," Engle says. "Our support vehicle would go 10-K ahead, we'd catch up, have something to drink, then let it go another 10-K ahead. We repeated that process all day." Come noon the trio would take a break to eat lunch, stretch tightened muscles, and nap. "It'd often be 120 degrees in the sun," says Engle. "It was like sleeping in a sauna." From 2:30 until 9:30, the trek would continue. "Dinner was the worst," says Engle, who lost 35 pounds in the first 35 days. "Couscous and goat, couscous and goat, couscous and goat. If I ever see either again I might go into convulsions..."


www.runnersworld.com/engle

Montana de los Muertos: coming 2008

http://www.dead100.com/

They have the skull there for a reason: this race is gonna have over 50,000ft of overall elavation gain.

So it looks like Barkley Marathon is gonna have a decent competition soon.

Barkley so far seemed to be the most gruesome of all those races. Not as well known as Badwater microwave race, but nevertheless Badwater sounds more like a cool vacation on an island compared to it.
http://www.mattmahoney.net/barkley/

Since the race began in 1986, only 6 runners out of about 600 have finished Barkley within the 60 hour cutoff.
The course record is 56 hours 57 min :)
It has 52,900 feet of elevation gain and a few more cool surprises :)

Talking about these races is like talking about merits of Veyron 16.4 (I bet insurance premium per year for it is more expensive than both of our cars are worth altogether :).
Still having a little meaningless chit-chat about Bartley's and Veyron's of the world is always kinda amusing :-)

Voting for the 2008 Speed Goat of the year is open!

Originally posted at:
http://www.wasatchspeedgoat.com/2008/01/22/379/

My 2008 Calendar

Finally I rounded up my race schedule for 2008. Thanks to SoCal Ultraseries race menu, the planning process got pretty painless and straightforward :)

Orange Curtain 100k
16-Feb-08
This is going to be my very first 3-digit race – although it is “just” a 100k and not a real 100M. This distance is twice longer than anything I ever did before. On the other hand it is a race on a pretty flat course. Basically it is a 10 times out-and-back along a channel in Cerritos – 10 times 10k race. The cut off time for it is 13h but I hope to do it in 11h – did not I do High Desert 50k in 5:27? – and High Desert did have some moderate elevation gain… Another good thing about Orange Curtain is that there will be several other OCTR runners doing 100k this year – Eric, Kim, Kirk, Natalie – and I expect to have a lot of fun there – not just a bunch of new blisters :)

Leona Divide 50M
19-Apr-08
My first trail 50 miler… I heard it is a pretty mild course with 9000ft of elevation gain spread over multiple ups and downs (as opposed to some blood-sucking 5-mile-long uphills some oter races have) and a runner-friendly terrain.

Saddleback Memorial Half Marathon
26-May-08
Looking at the other races on my list you could ask what this one is doing in here. It is a road race, and just a half marathon, which is a way shorter than many of our training runs. But I have an emotional attachment to this particular event. It became the first running event in my life back in 2006. Plus my daughter Sophia was born in Saddleback hospital in 2005, and our windows were looking at the event’s starting line :)

Holcomb Valley 33M
8-Jun-08
This 50K race takes place at the Big Bear area. Not sure about the elevation profile of the course but you cannot expect to be flat in those mountains. The lowest point of the course is 6750ft at the Big Bear lake; the highest is 8212ft. One thing I can say for sure – the course should be extremely spectacular!

Mt. Disappointment 50M
9-Aug-08
This is going to be a killer race – my most challenging event for the whole 2008. But this time I will come a way more prepared than last year as I know the course now and will be specifically training for this race doing a lot of hill work.

Bulldog 50k Ultra (questionable…)
23-Aug-08
As much as I want to do Bulldog, I am not sure I will be able to do it just two weeks after Mt. Disappointment 50 miler. Although the recovery time is not as long as it used to be for me in the past and I feel less crippled after my races, I still doubt it is any reasonable to do these two races almost back to back.

Noble Canyon 50k
29-Sep-08
Just as Greg asked before he did it in 2007, am I noble enough to do it? And taking into consideration 10,317ft of overall elevation gain, is it going to be a trail race or a trail hike for me?

Twin Peaks 50k (postponed) (questionable…)
?-Nov-Dec-08
The race was initially scheduled for February 2, 2008 and got postponed after half of its trails got burned during Santiago wildfire. Jess is trying to get a new permit for it and at this point it is not clear whether this race can happen in 2008 at all.

High Desert 50k
7-Dec-08
Although it is always freezing in Ridgecrest in December – around 30F at the start line – I could hardly say no to it. The course is spectacular, the race is fun to run, there are too few races in December, and I want to beat my last year 5:27 time there!

-----------
Besides that I hope I will have a chance to pace one of my buddies from our running club at one of the following races:

Angeles Crest 100
13-Sep-08
Angeles Crest is one of those heroic races I always wanted to get a glimpse of. As it is one of the most difficult 100 milers in US it is unlikely I will undertake anything like it before 2010 or 2011.

San Diego 100
20-Oct-08
San Diego might become my first 100 miler in 2009. So it would be cool to get a preview of it.

Nuts!

For quite a while I was under impression that ultra-running is a pretty young sport that did not exist before Karno published his Ultramarathon Man book. Well, I am slightly exaggerating the level of my ignorance, but it is close...

Another thing I was kinda sure about that ultra-running is mostly American sport that got some limited traction in Europe lately. I was completely shocked when I found out several months ago about Ultra Trail Tour du Mont Blanc (UTMB) 100-mile race that draws over 2000 athletes to the start line every year. I actually lived for almost 3 years within just 30 miles from those trails in Switzerland and never heard about this race!

Anyways I came across today a profile of William Sichel, a Scottish ultra-runner. What really struck me is that he did Monaco Six Day race, where he ran… hold your breath here…
503 miles / 810 km

It does not change my definition of nuts though. Whenever it comes 3-digit numbers (100K, 100 milers, or even 50 milers) we are talking about folks that are seriously nuts and there is no better way to describe them :)
However running 503 miles is as crazy as it gets!

Now a quick historical note:

Did you know?
The Six Day race reached a peak of popularity in the late 1800's - the pedestrian era - with regular major indoor races in London and New York. The Scottish Indoor Six Day record dates back to 1882 and was set in New York by George Noremac (or George D. Cameron to give him his correct name - Noremac is Cameron spelt backwards and was his professional name) - 912.9km / 567.2miles!

You know what else is completely crazy? William holds Guinness World Records on a treadmill: 100 miles in 24 hours. I do not survive on a treadmill longer that 20-25 min and really hate this thing…

Twin Peaks press leak

There has been a press leak that the new Twin Peaks 50M is going to become one of the toughest 50M courses in the world and the only race in trail running history that features two crazy Holly Jim climbs on the same course. And it will have 17,000ft of overall elevation gain too.

Although it all still might not happen I feel captivated with the idea and will be honored to DNF there even if it happens on the 21st feet of the 1st Holly Jim climb :)

The only downside is that for some slow folks like me the trails running race will end up in a painful trail hike. I was murmuring (a lot) about Gary Hillard’s ruthlessness during the last 5-mile climb of Mt. Disappointment, and it was only 50K with just 5,600ft overall elevation gain! What will I be thinking of Jess during and after Twin Peaks then?!

By the way Jess’ 50K is not going to be a vacation on an island either: only one Holly Jim, but still 11,000ft of elevation gain. I cannot understand myself: why does it sound like fun?

Mont-Blanc videos

Just came across a couple of cool old videos from Mont-Blanc 2006 race on YouTube:





What is really amazing is too see this absolutely enormous crowd of the 2000+ runners at the start of a 100-mile race!

Sitemeter, cheating & Badwater :)

I noticed some strange search activity surge through the Sitemeter today: several distinctively different people (Tennessee, Illinois, California) were searching info on “cheating at Badwater in 2007”, or “Badwater cheaters 2007”, etc. Such searches never came up in my stats before. Was there some press release recently about something like that?

While trying to find out what is going on with that I discovered a cool AdventureCORPS' archive of Badwater and Furnace Creek 508 race magazines (all in PDF format):
http://www.adventurecorps.com/downloads/index.html

Just went through the most recent Badwater magazine:
http://www.adventurecorps.com/downloads/bw/2007racemag.pdf
It contains a detailed historical note about the race as well as a bunch of interviews and useful pieces of advise about running in high-temperature conditions, although the latter does not seem to be extremely applicable to us right now: I even had to use running gloves a couple of days ago :)

The distance of truth

I think I will be competitive until they dig a hole and throw me in the ground. (Ferg Hawke) Although the DVD will be available on September 30, they have already added online ordering on their web site. We will see if this documentary is going to be at least as good as Running on the Sun.

Cheating in Europe

Just read a very curious recap from Scott Jurek about the Mont-Blanc race. The most interesting thing in it is the part about cheating and shortcuts when in Europe:

"I know in mountain running they’ll take the shortest routes as they wish, but the translated race rules said to not cut switchbacks for the sake of the environment. And we were led to believe that the runners were to stay directly on the very well marked course as we would in the States. But what we might call cheating is completely acceptable...
Maybe there is an unwritten rule that the top runners don’t have to adhere to the rules as closely as the others, as evidenced also by the outside aid and pacing of some of the top runners. Cultural difference? ... When in France, do as the French?!"

http://www.scottjurek.com/blog/2007/08/26/2007-utmb-report/

ultraRUNNING

I was under impression that the world beyond 26.2 marathon miles is limited to Iron Man triathlon competitions and very few enthusiasts like Dean Karnazes.

I was wrong. Although there are fewer people that got bored with marathon than the number of people still working towards their first marathon ever, I nevertheless was quite impressed by the number of ultra-running competitions.

The best resource I found on this topic is the ‘ultraRUNNING’ magazine: www.ultrarunning.com

Here are a couple of distinguishing features of ultra-running races:

-- Longer than marathon, 50km, 50 miles, 100km and 100 miles being the most common distances.

-- Usually off-road trail races, more often than not in some mountain areas – add crazy course elevations to crazy course length in other words.

Running 100km smells like some people are in urgent need for some professional psychological help. On the other hand it is just two and a half times marathon race – which sounds a bit better and less insane.

In any case it is quite challenging, or even ultraCHALLENGING, but at the same time not as out-of-reach as the Badwater 136-mile race through the red-hot Death Valley in July :-)

If anyone got interested, ultraRUNNING Online provides a list of upcoming ultra-race events in your area: www.ultrarunning.com/ultra/calendar

The Badwater Ultramarathon (Part II)

Some more details about the Badwater Ultramarathon race:

The start line is at Badwater, Death Valley, which marks the lowest elevation in the Western Hemisphere at 280’ (85m) below sea level. The race finishes at the Mt. Whitney Portals at 8360' (2533m).

The Badwater course covers three mountain ranges for a total of 13,000’ (3962m) of cumulative vertical ascent and 4,700’ (1433m) of cumulative descent. Here is the elevation profile of this race:

As if a 135 miles (217km) run is not challenging enough just by itself, the athletes are running in the Death Valley which is a very unfriendly (not to say hellish) environment in July, when this yearly competition is held. The temperatures rise up to 130F (55C).

Do not get me wrong - I do not plan to ever do it myself. I am just amazed at men and women that have guts - strength, endurance and above all unquenchable determination - to do it.

The Badwater Ultramarathon

I have always associated the marathon with an ultimate test of human physical and mental capabilities. Running 26 miles (42 km) without a stop, and running it fast! No wonder that the guy that did it first of all in ancient Greece collapsed and died after he ran from the town of Marathon to Athens to deliver the message about Greek victory.

No doubt marathon is very challenging and relatively few people dare to do it. But I have found out lately that it is clearly not challenging enough for certain folks. Many of the top devoted to the long-distance running athletes participate in the Badwater Ultramarathon.

The Badwater Ultramarathon is one of the most difficult running races in the world; covering 135 miles (217 km) and 13,000 feet (4,000 m) of elevation gain nonstop from the bottom of Death Valley over three mountain ranges up to the 8,500 mark on Mt. Whitney.

And even this is not a limit!
In 2005 Dean Karnazes ran 350 miles (563 km) straight, nonstop. It took him 80 hours and 44 minutes, eating on the run, no sleeping. His crew calculated that he ate something like 40,000 calories and drank nine gallons (34 liters) of liquid during these 80 hours.

In September 2006 Dean is about to run 50 marathons in each of 50 states in 50 consecutive days… http://www.enduranceis.com/e50/

“The human body is an amazing machine; if we just can get beyond our perceived limitations, I think we can achieve more than we ever thought possible.” - Dean Karnazes

“There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is being superior to your previous self.” - Tim Twietmeyer