(And what | learned from it.)

ANYON, TEXAS, October 20, C 2012—Twenty weeks of training through a hot Texas summer, the highest weekly training mileage ever, a persistent cough a month before the race, a couple of cracked ribs from coughing, and two weeks of complete inactivity—it’s amazing to think that all of that could add up to a race I enjoyed more than any other—the Palo Duro Trail Run.

Hari, Susan, Heather, and I all drove to Canyon, Texas, on Friday morning, each in our own vehicles with our families, running gear, and lots of camera equipment. The text messages flew back and forth as we traveled six hours through the West Texas high plains, and the news of the State Fair of Texas’s Big Tex burning to the ground earlier that morning A|am happy for the “lucky 3”in my race number. was a hot topic.

Everyone had reservations at the Best Western except for Susan and Ed, who were camping, and I was happy to see we were in room 301 (“3” is my lucky number). Traveling with a large group is always like herding cats, and after the usual confusion and chaos, we drove over to the West Texas A&M University campus for the packet pickup and prerace pasta dinner. Once again, I was happy my race number ended in a “3.” I’m not superstitious, but every little thing helps.

© Michael Friedhoff

We saw other friends from Dallas there, had a surprisingly good dinner, and listened to the race organizers talk about the next day’s race. They displayed the course, which looked like nothing more than colored loops on the screen, talked about how to attach the timing chips, and went over the logistics of getting into the park.

Before the race, people kept asking me what my time goal was. My answer was always the same: I have no idea. In a marathon, it’s pretty standard that everyone wants to finish under four hours. That’s the dream goal. For a SOK, I had no idea what the standard was. Maybe it’s because trail racecourses are all so different, or maybe I had missed something, but I honestly had nothing to go on when people asked me that question. Our longest training runs had all been in extremely warm temperatures, and I had no idea how that could possibly translate to a specific finish time in an actual trail race.

I decided that my race goals would be to finish and to have fun.

I was seriously worried about being able to finish running 31 miles within 12 hours. Our two 26-mile training runs had seemed to take forever, and I knew it was going to be warm for the race, especially the last loop. Everyone laughed at my fear of not finishing, but I was honestly worried. The race organizer at one point said: “It’s not about how fast you run; tomorrow’s race is all about finishing. It’s an endurance race.” For some reason his words were calming.

As we walked back to our car, we found ourselves engaged in conversation with Dos Loco Senoritas, two ladies who had been introduced to the crowd during dinner. For the past 13 years they’ve handled the most remote aid station on

Hari, me,
two race volunteers known
as Dos Locos
Senoritas, and
Heather after
the prerace
pasta dinner.

g g s = °

the course and were famous for putting on a crazy water stop. They were incredibly friendly, and you could tell they loved volunteering each year for the race. I couldn’t wait to see them the next day out on the course.

Everyone went to bed early, and I tried to read and play “Words with Friends” with Heather. I was nervous, really nervous, but had reached the point where I knew there was nothing I could do but get the job done the next day. Before I fell asleep, I calculated in my head what my finish time would be if I had to walk the last few miles and was happy to realize that I could walk if I had to and still finish within the cutoff.

Race day

Everyone met in the hotel lobby at 5:30 a.m. for the 12-mile drive to the canyon. It was cold, in the low 40s, and I was glad I had worn track pants and gloves. Trail running is like preparing for a military operation, and each of us carried our camping chairs, coolers, clothes, and gear out to the car. Getting into the park went faster than I expected, and soon we followed a trail of lights down into the canyon. It was a completely clear sky, with a visible Milky Way, and it was difficult to find the constellation Orion because of so many competing stars.

After gathering up our gear, we started the walk down a row of stairs to the start. I turned on my headlamp, but it didn’t seem to put out much light. Bagpipes were playing and I remarked that it sounded like a dirge. We set up our camping chairs at the bag-drop area and stood in line for the restroom, which was thankfully not very crowded. I was excited, especially to be running in cold temperatures at the start. There was an electric current of nervous energy in the air, and I couldn’t help but be struck by how different the start of a trail race is from the start of a marathon.

We had just enough time to get our water bottles, take off our track pants, and head down to the start line. Hugs to Heather and Susan, whose 20K started 25 minutes later, and Heather made a comment about my headlamp being so dim. I realized the new batteries I put in must have been old. They gave off almost no light. Except for the light from everyone else’s headlamps, it was pitch dark. Great.

50K/50M start and first loop: six miles

The bagpipes were a quirky, hauntingly beautiful way to start the race. After I saw a few friends and we wished each other luck, the air horn blasted and we were off. Hari and I stuck close together, and I realized I truly had no light. After curving back around through the picnic area, we very quickly were running on a narrow single-track trail. I couldn’t see anything at my feet. I made the mistake of telling Hari to go in front of me, thinking his headlamp would light up the trail

enough for me to see, but the lights behind me caused my shadow to block out any light ahead. I was truly running blind.

We were a tightknit train of runners, and I was running purely on feel. The trail was anything but flat, and I ran up every hill, over every rock, and somehow didn’t fall. Some parts of the trail were like a deep, narrow rut with steep sides, and it was like running on a tightrope. That was the worst. Sometimes faster people passed when they were able to, but for the most part everyone followed each other. Eventually we came to the 50M/50K split, and things thinned out considerably.

The course is essentially a 12.5-mile loop. The 50M is four loops, the 20K one, and the 50K runs a six-mile section of the lower loop and then two 12.5 loops. There were four aid stations, which meant you could run the course with just a handheld water bottle.

Gradually the sky got lighter and the trail was easier to see. Hari kept up a fast pace, and we ran up every hill. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and we took a moment to look around at the canyon as the sun came up. We ran past the first aid station, noticed a thermometer that said 38 degrees, and ran down some steep stairs I knew I would be cursing on the last loop. Before I knew it we had already run our first six miles and were back at the bag drop. I felt great.

Second loop: 12.5 miles

After crossing the timing mats, Hari and I ran over to our bags. It had already warmed up considerably, and I got rid of the long-sleeve shirt, gloves, and worthless headlamp and filled up my water bottle and grabbed my sunglasses. Coming out of the porta-potty, I saw Hari doing the yoga pose downward dog right in front of the aid station, with three West Texas cowboy volunteers looking down at him like he was from outer space. I yelled at him to come on, that he could get shot for doing something like that in West Texas, and we were off again as the cowboys laughed behind us. I can’t take Hari anywhere.

As we started to run, I noticed that water kept sloshing out of my handheld water bottle. I took off the lid and tightened it several times, but it kept leaking. It was making my shoes and socks wet, which I knew might eventually cause blisters. Also, I had left my gloves at the bag drop, but it was still pretty cold, and the sloshing water was making my hands cold and wet. I finally realized that the inner seal on the bottle had broken off and was rattling around inside the bottle, and the top wasn’t just leaking, it had a quarter-inch-diameter hole out of which water was gushing with each arm swing. It splashed water the entire 12.5 miles, and I had to make sure I filled up at every aid station to have enough water until the next one. I probably lost at least a half-bottle’s worth of water between aid stations.

© Michael Friedhoff

4 These stairs are much steeper than they look, especially after the third loop.

It was on the second loop that we started seeing my husband, Michael, everywhere. As we rounded a corner we would see Michael taking photos and video. Then we would see Hari’s mom, dad, and wife taking photos and yelling. We felt like celebrities being hounded by the paparazzi. It was easy to smile for the cameras because I felt great.

We wondered how Heather and Susan were doing in the 20K. Eventually we saw them on the course and found out they both ran great times, especially Susan, whose knee injury had kept her from running the SOK with us. We ran into our friend Greg, whose son was running his first 50-mile race, and we saw Nicole, also running her first 50-mile race, at an aid station toward the end of her second loop. We couldn’t believe how relaxed and happy she looked after running 25 miles, and we didn’t know it at the time, but she was the first female lead in the 50-mile. We also began seeing several runners we would see the rest of the day on the course. Sometimes they would pull ahead, and sometimes we would pass them.

I didn’t really pay much attention to my time during the race. I would look down at my Garmin and be surprised, thinking, Of, it’s only been four hours! Time didn’t mean much to me since I had no prior SOK experience to go on.

I made note at mile 10 of how good I felt and remembered the adage that the first 10 miles of a marathon should feel easy. The sun was very strong, but the air was still relatively cool. I loved running in the low humidity, and I especially loved not having to deal with roots and stumps on the course, like back home in Dallas. We began walking up the steepest hills but were still running up the smaller hills and keeping a good pace. I felt really, really good and reveled in running in the desert. More than anything else, I felt grateful to be able to run a race in such a beautiful location. I know I was running with a huge smile on my face.

The aid stations were unlike anything I had ever seen in a marathon, and all of the volunteers were extremely friendly and helpful. Several people had told me how great Coke is during an ultra, and I have to say they were right. The only other liquid besides water was Heed, which tasted horrible to me, so the Coke really hit the spot. I also discovered that I loved boiled potatoes. I stayed away from the PB&J sandwiches, mostly because I’ve never been a fan of peanut butter but also because I didn’t want to eat something I had never tried before in training.

We could hear the Dos Loco Senoritas aid station before we could see it. It was fairly remote on the course, and the landscape before we got there was like running on Mars. We ran through a twisty, shady area and could hear loud laughter, and I knew we must be close. Both ladies remembered us from the night before, and I think we could have stayed there the rest of the day visiting with them.

Finally, we got to the stairs again, noticed they were a little tougher to run down, ran along a creek under some shade trees, and finished our second loop: 18.5 miles down.

Third loop: 12.5 miles

We took the time at the bag drop to get prepared for the last loop. I changed to a sleeveless shirt and changed my socks, which were wet from the sloshing water, and switched to my other water bottle, thankful that I had thought to bring it. It was very warm, the sun was blazing, and I knew this last loop would probably get tough toward the end. However, there was no doubt that I was going to finish.

We saw Michael again, who was amazed that we looked so strong. I told him I felt “ridiculously good,” and I meant it. More important, I was having a blast.

I don’t remember as much from the last loop. We ran, walked up most of the hills, talked a lot, got quiet, talked to other runners on the trail, and ate at the aid stations. The heat wasn’t as much of a problem for me as the intensity of the unrelenting sun. Even though I wore a cap and sunglasses, the sun’s reflection off the sand and canyon walls was brutal. I was amazed at how many runners I had seen during the day who wore neither cap nor sunglasses.

I never hit the Wall as I do in a marathon. I noticed at mile 21 that I was tired and sore but nothing out of the ordinary. It was exciting to reach mile 22 and know we were in the single digits of miles left to run, and then we celebrated reaching mile 27, our longest distance ever. I told Hari that whatever happened from that point on, we could honestly say we were ultrarunners.

We found ourselves running with two women. They were fast on the downhills, but we were faster on the uphills and flat sections. We kept passing each other, back and forth, until I let them pass and told Hari to put some space between us. I could tell that one of them was probably in my age group, and for a while I

<@ It’s hot, and I’m ready to be done.

toyed with the idea of trying to stay ahead of them, but I was starting to get too tired to care.

We came once again to the Dos Loco Senoritas aid station. Someone was downing a shot of Kahlua, which meant yelling “Hot damn!” afterward. I sat down on the edge of a stool and one of the ladies came over and poured ice-cold water down the back of my shirt, something I normally wouldn’t enjoy. It felt great.

This last section of the race was the hardest, of course. It was hot, the sun was intense, and I felt like one of those characters in a Western who is found aimlessly wandering in the desert. Hari found some hidden strength and pulled quite a ways ahead of me, and I just kept running. By this time my quads were shot, and it hurt to run the downhills—something I’ve never experienced before. I was walking the uphills and downhills, which meant a lot of walking. I didn’t really care.

On a particularly rocky section where you run along the edge of a cliff, in the middle of the silence and the solitude and the faint stupor I was in, an explosion of unexpected yelling began ahead of me. “Woo, hoo! Hari! Yay!” I looked up, and standing high above us across the canyon, on top of a huge rock, was Hari’s entire family, Heather and Marc, and Susan. I got tears in my eyes! We had been seeing them everywhere along the course, but this truly was the middle of nowhere. I thought to myself, Those guys are crazy! As I got closer they started yelling my name and cheering me on and then climbed down. Susan wanted to run the last few miles in with us, which seemed only right since she had trained with us all summer. We had come full circle.

I was very tired by this time, and it was great to have Susan there to add some energy to the end of the race. We came to the last aid station, and I asked one of the ladies if I could sit down in one of their chairs for just a minute. All I wanted was to get off my feet. Afterward, we had those damn stairs again, and I had to walk sideways to get down them—my quads hurt that much. I walked a lot the

s = °

last two or three miles, and I knew it was more mental than physical. I also knew Hari had more left in the tank than I did and knew he could easily have finished 10 or 20 minutes ahead of me if he had wanted to. I debated with myself whether I wanted to run and finish 10 minutes faster or not and decided that I didn’t want it enough. I just wanted to finish and didn’t care about my time.

The battery in my Garmin was almost dead, and the “low battery” alert blocked out the time, so I had no clear idea what our final time was going to be. I thought we were around eight hours of running, and I was happy with that. For some reason I kept looking at my watch, even though I couldn’t tell what time it was. I think I just wanted time to speed up and go faster. It was mentally very tough to keep running, and I felt slightly nauseous, maybe from the heat or not eating enough.

The last mile seemed as though it would never end, but finally we could hear yelling, and then I could see a flag through the trees. The finish line!

There was a tiny, gradual hill before the turn to the finish line, and I hated it during that last loop. Hari ran ahead, intent on finishing, and I remember seeing a man hobbling ahead of me toward the finish line. I would be lying if I didn’t admit I felt some small pleasure at passing him. We were surprised to see one of our running friends, James, who was supposed to be running with Nicole, run ahead of us through the finish line and then stop to shake all of our hands. I found out later that he wasn’t feeling well and still had one more loop to run. (He managed to finish and even qualified for

a crossed the line, and it was only PA LO DU RO later that Michael told me I had

Western States.) finished around 7:30 (7:33:31 to TRAI L RU N

I didn’t see the clock when I be exact). Lots of lucky 3s!

Finish!

Afterward, all l wanted to do was sit. I’m never hungry for hours after a really long run, was still feeling a little nauseous, and had no appetite for the burgers and hot dogs being served. It was hot and there wasn’t much shade. We found out it was around 95

(Left to right): Susan, me, Heather,
Hari, and Nicole at the finish.

© Michael Friedhoff.

degrees when we finished. Someone handed Hari a beer, making him the happiest man in the canyon at that moment.

I took off my shoes and socks and discovered that I had three blisters, all on my toes. I know they were from the sloshing water bottle.

We stayed long enough to see Nicole, in her very first 50-mile race, cross the finish line as first female overall. She looked incredibly strong and relaxed and was smiling nonstop. What an inspiration!

realized I had forgotten all about the food I had brought in my cooler, dolmas and pita bread with hummus. The aid stations were so well stocked that I never even thought about anything else. I did eat several chocolate GUs and part of a Honey Waffle Stinger that I had in the water-bottle pouch out on the course, but I never once thought about the dolmas that had tasted so great all summer. I might have had more energy for those last few miles if I had eaten some real food, as I did in training.

After resting back at the hotel, all 11 of us had dinner at a wonderful Thai/Lao restaurant in town. I was tired but not exhausted. It was a satisfying tiredness. Back at the hotel, Michael, who had spent the day carting all the still and video camera equipment back and forth on the course, fell asleep before I did.

Final thoughts

We met a man at a gas station on the drive home who had run the 50-mile race. He said he had run the race the past three years and this was definitely the hottest it had ever been. We learned later the temperature reached 108 degrees by 5:00 p.M. I can’t imagine running for that long in those temperatures. There were about 20 DNFs in the 50-mile and 10 in the SOK.

The age groups for the SOK were very different: 39 and under and 40 and up. I placed sixth in the over-40 age group. The two women who were faster on the downhills on the final loop were fourth and fifth.

The broken ribs that had almost kept me from even attempting the 50K were no problem the entire race. They were, however, a little sorer the week after the race.

I loved the fact that I never hit the Wall during the race. I felt fatigued at the end and my quads were sore, but there was never a point in the race where I felt that I wouldn’t be able to finish. Despite all my nervousness about finishing within the 12-hour cutoff, it was never a problem.

A friend told me years ago that the Palo Duro Trail Run is a good first trail race. He was right. I loved the SOK. It’s very well organized, the volunteers are the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and the scenery is stunning. It can be warm, but you can train for that—or run the SOK and be done before the heat gets too high. I would run the 50-mile only if I knew that I was fast enough to finish early and beat the worst of the heat. If you don’t do the race, at least come back in the winter and run on the trails. They’re my favorite, so far.

And what | learned from it

Give up your time goals. I loved having no other goals than finishing and having fun, which seem to me to be the most important goals to have when attempting a new race distance. Even though I worried the night before about finishing the race before the cutoff, once the race started it was freeing not to obsess about my time as I usually do during a road marathon. In fact, when my Garmin died shortly after this race, I was inspired by our friend Nicole, who won first female at Palo Duro and never runs or races with a watch, to adopt her “run by feel” philosophy and run watch-free from now on. I ran a half marathon recently without a watch, ran negative splits, and had my second-fastest finish time at that distance—and most important, I enjoyed every second of the race.

Trust your training plan. After the race, I felt a great sense of accomplishment in going out of my comfort zone and doing something I had never done before. It was an afterglow similar to how I felt after qualifying for Boston. A month before the race, I was convinced that I wouldn’t be able to run the full 50K, but I did it. I also know that I ran really well until the last few miles, and I’m happy with the pace we kept and the strength I had on the hills. Our training plan worked, and losing two weeks to illness didn’t have as much of an effect on my performance as I had thought it would.

You can train for a 50K on about the same weekly mileage as a marathon training plan. The two 26-milers we ran in training were mentally good for us but not physically necessary to be ready to run the 50K distance. You can train for and be ready to run a 50K on a few 20-milers as long as your overall mileage is fairly high (50-60 miles per week). If you have a good base, you can be ready on even fewer miles per week (40-50).

The back-to-back Saturday/Sunday long runs are the most important component in getting ready for an ultra. It’s all about learning to run on tired legs and spending more time on your feet than you’re used to. I believe that got me more ready for the ultra distance than anything else we did in training.

If you’re going to have hills in your race, make sure you train on hills on your trail runs. Adding hills on your street mileage also helps, but trail hills not only simulate the racecourse, they also add more strength to your quads and give you practice in navigating rocks and other obstacles.