By Eric Davis

To all my running, rowing & biking friends:

I have a fun story to share, and I hope you don't mind if I brag a little...  I don't think I've been so proud of myself for an athletic achievement since breaking 5 minutes in the mile as a kid.  The only thing which might rival this on the "feel good" scale was the come-back to the national team in 1999.

Anyway, this weekend, I finished the Mountain Masochist Trail Run, a 54-mile slog in the Blue Ridge Mountains just North & West of Lynchburg, Virginia, my home town.  My dad has done the race for 20 years, but I never really had much ambition to do anything like it until last year when the old man barely made it through the last check-point on pace to break 12 hours and finish before dark.  Because the race organizers are afraid of losing people in the woods in the dark (and the cold), runners are officially pulled off the course if they don't get through the 43-mile check point by 4:30PM.  My thought last year was that my dad might only have a few more years left to complete the race as an official competitor, so if I was ever going to run the thing, I may as well do it while he's still in the event.

The race itself is rugged, especially the 2nd half.  With 9,000 feet of total cumulative elevation gain, and 7,000 feet of cumulative decline, there isn't much flat ground.  More importantly, the footing in a lot of places is pretty treacherous.  The route from miles 43 to 47, besides being hilly, is barely even a trail -- basically an old deer path highlighted by white streamers every 50 to 100 yards.  The former course record holder is a 2:19 marathoner who covered the supposed 4 miles from 43 to 47 in 45 minutes during his record setting run.  He said he felt like he was really moving.

There were 240 starters, and the batch of folks I was with are true "ultra marathoners", meaning they do several ultra's per year.  This, of course, was my first.  Yesterday's winner lives in Colorado and recently won the US 50-mile trail championship in Washington state.  (Interestingly, he runs 100 to 120 miles per week, but his best time for 10K is only 34 minutes.)

Overall, the race was almost full-on "fun" for me.  As per instructions from the race director, David Horton, one of America's best-ever ultra runners, I went out really slow in the first half.  I ran almost all of the first 20 miles with a really fun, "hotty/smarty" 41-year old Yale grad who was doing her 5th ultra in the last 8 months.  My sister would call Rachel a super "party favor", in that she's a walking load of fun.  She got to know me really quickly and had a good time making fun of me for being an Ivy league dumb jock and not knowing how to read.  My best friend from high school joined us up at mile 10 and ran with us from mile to mile 18, adding to the almost party-like atmosphere.  A lot of guys knew the Yale hotty/smarty, so I was often with a group of 2 - 4 other ultra vets who would float in and out of our conversations, making the event feel more like a rolling picnic than a "race".

In the first 20 miles, I ran exactly as per the "conservative plan", walking up almost all of the significant hills, as everybody around me did.  As per instructions from Dr. Horton, I drank a ton, taking a full cup of sport drink at every aid station and carrying a half a water bottle with me between each stop.  (The advice I got was drink so much that you have "to keep peeing all day", and I definitely did that.)  I grabbed a handful of food at each aid station, and over the course of the day, I sucked down a PowerBar and 3 goo's that I carried in my back pocket from the start.  Bottom line on the fueling & hydrating, I never felt "bad" at all.  My quads started to feel beaten up by mile 20, but I always had a lot of energy in reserve.

By the time I got to mile 22 or so, I started to feel a little confident, so I left the fun times with the Yale hotty/smarty and her ultra groupies.  All I really did was start to walk "FAST" up the hills, and suddenly I was putting major distance on my old group and passing people like mad.

Anyway, I went through the major aid station at 27 miles in 5 hours, and everybody says that if you've paced yourself, you can simply double your time to calculate your overall finish.  Thus, I was on pace for a 10-hour day, definitely something I would have been happy with.  In fact, all I really wanted to do was just finish.

I picked up another friend from Lynchburg and Harvard at that 27 mile mark and we kept to the "walk up the hills" plan.  I was trying to be more aggressive, but at the same time, I knew I had to save something in reserve for what everybody said would be the hardest part of the course, the "loop" from miles 33 to 38, and the "deer path" from 43 to 48.  Frank and I moved through some people pretty quickly on the loop, but I still didn't know what to expect for the last 12 miles.

Anyway, after leaving Frank at mile 38, I had a goo, and just started to feel "good".  My quads were already completely trashed, but my energy level was super.  So instead of walking up the hills, I started running them.  And that's when I just started to plow people down.  By the time I got to mile 42 or so, I was starting to calculate my finish time -- getting greedy.  Except for the steepest of cliff-type hills, I pretty much ran the rest of the way home, and for the last 5 miles I was pretty much running as fast as I would ever run on my normal, Monday morning, post-bike-ride, 5-mile run in Santa Monica (certainly 7:00 pace).

Anyway, my last "half" of the race was about 4:15, which I was pretty pleased with...  What that tells me, though, is that all of those people under 8:30 are pretty damned good.  At least for the last 25% of the race, I was pacing myself like I might in the middle of a hard marathon -- grinding, running for time, not fooling around...  Certainly, those guys running in the low 7:00 range are incredible.  Full-on studs.

Amazingly, my dad ran 45 minutes faster than the prior year, and easily making it under the 12 hour cut-off.  Now having seen the entire course, it's amazing that any 66-year old would want to subject themselves to this kind of self-torture.  And it's even more amazing that MY DAD, with the limited strength, flexibility and balance that he now has, can make it over so much rough terrain so relatively quickly.  Interestingly, my time of 9:15 was just a wee bit slower than his best time on the course which he ran nearly 20-years ago when he was regularly running marathons in the high 2:40's and running 70 to 90 hard miles per week.

It was so interesting to be exposed to the world of ultra marathoning.  The racers were really friendly and supportive, and the event had a completely different feel than any other "race" I've ever been in.  Ultra marathoners seem to have a sense of patience and perspective that you certainly don't find in the average population.  Perhaps the best advice I got from my dad before the race was that no matter how bad you feel, just hang in there.  He said the race is so long, you've got plenty of time to recover and feel good again.  Just hang in there, don't give up, keep chugging.  You'll do just fine...

Hope you are all well...  Come to California and let's do something fun.