Stories
from beyond the marathon
The scariest part of an ultra -- the part that knots your gut with fear and churns your mind with doubt and despair -- isn't even on the course.
It's a place most ultra-runners visit at least once or twice during their ultra-running careers. It's a place most hope they'll never see again. It's the place you find yourself when you realize you've gone off course in the race. And the farther off course you are, the scarier it is.
Texas ultra-runner Eunsup Kim, who went deeply off course during the 2006 Heartland 100 at Cassoday, Kansas, has a name for it -- "Hell."
At 70 miles into the out-and-back Heartland, the course takes a sharp right turn. Take it, and you're inbound to the friendly faces, lights, and heated tent of the Teeterville Road aid station, five miles away. Miss it, and your next stop is the Twilight Zone. You wander dark dirt roads through the remote Flint Hills – one of the few parts of Kansas that is far from flat and that has more cattle per square mile than people.
If you keep going, it's 15 miles to the next town. At night, the turn is marked with signs, ribbons, glow sticks, and a big flour arrow on the ground. "We put just about everything we could think of out there," says Randy Albrecht, one of Heartland’s two race directors.
But when Kim came through, about 1 a.m. in the 2006 race, everything was gone but the flour arrow. Kim didn't see it through the fog of exhaustion in the moonless dark.
"Course vandalism is usually pretty low at Heartland," commented Jim Davis, the other race director, who sweeps the course. "But except for the flour arrow," Davis said,
"everything was definitely missing from the crossing when I came through after the last runner. That would have been a little past 2:30 a.m."
Missing the turn, Kim kept straight on the rutty dirt road, which was similar to what he had been on all day.
"I passed several intersections," Kim said, "but didn't see any course indicators. I thought the organizers didn't put sufficient glow sticks on the course."
At one point, Kim heard yelling far away, off to his right. He said he thought it might have been the Teeterville Road aid station but wasn't sure how to get to it. That's when the thunderstorm hit.
Lightning spiked the sky overhead, and the thunder blasted like cannon fire: 18-inchers, Kim said. He saw a nearby house and barn and ran for it, yelling, "Hello, hello!" but there was no response. Then the clouds opened up with a freezing downpour. Kim found a rare prairie tree and tried to shelter, not very successfully, from the rain. At 5 a.m., he was on the move again, but in bad shape.
"I was hungry and thirsty. It was all I could do to turn on my headlamp and walk slowly down the road," he said.
Meanwhile, when Kim hadn't shown up at Teeterville, the volunteers got worried and cellphones -- where there was service -- buzzed. By 4 a.m., Albrecht was driving the country roads in search of the lost runner. He saw Kim's light shortly after the storm and swooped in for the rescue.
Later, back at the Heartland race headquarters, Kim -- now warm, dry, and fed -- summed up his four-hour off-course experience. "I was in hell," he said.
Vandalism also sent Vermont runner "Sherpa" John LaCroix and friend Marla Luckey, from Illinois, into the Twilight Zone during the 2007 Pittsfield Peaks Ultra Challenge in the Green Mountains of Vermont. The 53-mile point-to-point ultra and relay takes runners across the tops of six prominent peaks.
LaCroix suspects locals of rerouting the pink surveyor's ribbons that sent them and several others the wrong way across a stream and onto a moose trail, about 18 miles into the race. LaCroix knew it was a moose trail because of the matted-down grass, broken bushes, churned-up mud and rocks, and heaps of moose poop. Though he and Luckey had their doubts, they continued on because the course markings had so clearly pointed them that way. But soon, even the moose trail petered out, and the bushwhacking began.
The pair fought their way uphill through brush so thick and high that 90 percent of the time they couldn't see their feet or the sky, LaCroix said. Nettles, thorny blackberry bushes, and other aggressive plant life tore at them. "We looked like the Passion of the Christ by the time we were done," LaCroix said. "We looked like we just got out of a room full of angry cats.
"I kept telling Marla 'just a little further,' but deep down I had no clue and was getting nervous and desperate."
Part of the desperation was thirst. Each had a full hand-held water bottle when they hit the fork, but after 90 minutes of fighting the flora uphill in the June heat and humidity, they were running on empty. Finally, the pair found a snowmobile trail and followed it to the top of the hill -- but saw no pink ribbons. LaCroix recognized Bloodroot Mountain in the distance and realized they were about two miles from where he thought they were, but he wasn’t sure how to rejoin the course.
LaCroix and Luckey worried they might DNF, if they got out at all, La Croix said, when luck hit. They heard a shout, and running a little farther on the trail, they found "roving aid station" volunteer Drew Hawley.
Even better, Hawley's ATV was parked next to a tree marked with a pink ribbon. They were back on course, but in the nearly two hours they had been lost, they had advanced only two miles in the race.
"Drew got us going again," he said.
They headed out slowly, just as several more scratched-up victims of vandalism popped out of the woods behind them. Hawley reported the vandalized ribbons, LaCroix said, and one of the race coordinators, Joe Desena, got them fixed.
LaCroix and Luckey finished, bloodied but unbowed, in about 16 hours.
Outside of vandalism, off-course episodes are usually due to "pilot error," according to ultra-runner Marty Fritzhand, who tallies 17 hundred-mile finishes in 20 starts since 1998. Fritzhand, of Cincinnati, should know, he says, since he gets off course a lot. Most are easily corrected mistakes of only a few hundred yards or less, but he got a scare at Western States in 2000 that's with him yet.
Fritzhand was with a group of about a dozen runners, he said. It was around 9 a.m., and the group, walking and trotting, had just passed No-Hands Bridge, with plenty of time to get in under 30 hours. Immersed in conversation, the group sailed right past the turnoff up the escarpment to Auburn.
"We’d gone about a mile,"Fritzhand recalled, “When someone noticed we hadn't seen any course markers or even any sneaker prints in the dirt road. "Were we going the right way? No one knew! I was worried -- I got this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Here I'd put all this time and effort in, and then not to finish -- because I'd got lost -- I was concerned, to say the least," Fritzhand said.
Luck found the wayward group, in the form of two joggers who told the group they had missed the turn, and then led them back.
Fritzhand got his finish, and in subsequent Western States, he hasn't missed that turn.
Even knowing the course isn't always proof against leaving it. In a recent edition of the H.U.R.T. 100, Fritzhand went off course twice. He was about 10 miles into his third of five 20-mile laps when he missed a sharp left turn in the dark and continued into the brush. He had fought the brush for about 20 yards, when he looked back and saw the lights of runners on the rooty trail -- but none coming toward him.
Realizing he was off course, Fritzhand quickly left the brush. Then, at the same place on the fourth lap, the same thing happened. "It’s just a matter of the mind not always working right when you’ve gone that far in a race," said Fritzhand, who counts that race among his finishes.
Perhaps the surest way to avoid trips to the Twilight Zone, vandalism notwithstanding, is to have a rested pacer in the late stages of races. "I don’t think we've ever had a runner get lost who was accompanied by a pacer," says Davis. "Except one time when the pacer had also been up all night."
If you're on your own, however, backtrack as soon as you have doubts. That's advice from Ed Demoney, a Northern Virginia runner and race director. Demoney, 73, is still adding to the more than 125 ultras on his resume, which includes 26 hundred-mile finishes. He has also served as RD for the storied Massanutten Mountain Trail 100 in Virginia.
The longer you go, the harder it is to turn around, says Demoney, who has gotten off track at Wasatch Front, Angeles Crest, and a few other 100-mile races, both from vandalism and from pilot error.
Even vandalism has a solution, though perhaps not a perfect one. At Heartland, Davis and Albrecht have identified the two places where runners can easily miss turns, especially if the course markings are swiped or changed. Now, volunteers check on both locations regularly throughout the race, a practice that might -- or might not -- have saved Kim some heartache.
As traumatic as the off-course experience can be, it doesn't deter runners from trying again. The fright fades from memory, just like the aches and pains. Both are outweighed every time by the plentiful positives of ultra-running.
Fritzhand, who got an award for "friendliest runner" at the 2008 Rocky Raccoon Trail 100 in Texas, counts camaraderie and meeting old friends and making new ones among his top reasons for running ultras. You could argue that those very things helped distract and get him and others off course at Western States. And plenty of runners have tales about how they got off course following other runners who were off course.
On the other hand, like most ultra-runners, Fritzhand has many a story about how timely shouts from other runners kept him from going wrong. In the end, it's the lure of the ultra-marathon finish -- as good as a win or place in any other race -- that keeps many runners coming back despite knowing that pain awaits, and a trip to the Twilight Zone may lurk just one wrong turn away.
"I'm definitely considering going back to Heartland this year," says Kim. "'I'm confident I can do it."
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Your crew will only be as good as the prep you give them. Figure out what you'll need at each aid station. Write it down and give it to your crew. As a runner, I get tired and forget that I need more gels, more S-caps, and so forth. They remember for me, and let me concentrate on the race.
Also, a good crew will not be in your face with a lot of questions about "do you want this, and do you want that?" They should know if you want something special, you'll ask. Anything else is already on the checklist and they get it for you automatically.
I'd say you need at least two or three people. That way, they can work shifts and stay fresh. A crew that's as sleep-deprived as you might not be as effective as you'd like.
You'll be glad later if you have a designated photographer on the crew.
A good crew will be prepared for the gradual, but marked deterioration in you from studly runner at the start to quivering blob of jello by the finish.
I know "CREW" stands for "Cranky Runners Endless Waiting. . ." but under no circumstances should you be cranky with your crew. Even if they mess up, laugh about it and save your cussing for the trail.
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