Lookout Mountain 50 Miler: The Day I Fell out of Love with my Kinvaras

For the past three weeks, I have been traveling for interviews, dragging with me an embarrassing amount of luggage, including two separate pairs of Saucony Kinvara 3s.  One pair tends to cut into my heels but only has 100-200 miles on it, so I brought this pair for all my shorter runs.  The other pair broke in easily and had not rubbed on my heels, but it had 500 miles on it, so I carried these shoes to Pittsburgh, Greenville, Cincinnati, Rochester, and Columbus, just to wear for the Lookout Mountain 50 Miler in Chattanooga, TN.

In training for past 50s, I have run weekly mileages in the 60s with long runs every weekend working up to 6 hours or 36 miles.  Since starting my clinical years, I have not been able to maintain this schedule. With a front-loaded fourth year schedule, I struggled to get a few short weekday runs in a week with long runs occurring every 2-3 weeks.  I did manage a 5 1/2 hour mountain run 3 weeks prior to the race and I was counting on this to carry me through. I knew this training could allow me to finish, but no more, so I spent a lot of time preparing myself to be miserable for much of the race.  As such, the pace chart I wrote on my arm was quite conservative:

This race was Nathan's first 50 miler, and he drove up from Charleston to meet me for the race.  We were a little nervous about the weather: 39 degrees is perfect, but rain complicates things. We got to the race start, waited in the car awhile, dropped off our drop bags, and then decided to go back and sit in the dry car some more.  Nathan was very excited to start his first 50:

He perked up once we hit the trail.

400 runners were signed up for the 50 miler.  There were definitely not that many at the start.  I heard rumors that some people ran a few feet in the rain and then said, "Oh, nevermind," and turned around.  Not us.  We were in it to suffer.

Much of the first section was single track along a ridgeline.  The rain was falling and there were plenty of puddles.  The options were to step in the puddle or on the slippery edge of the cliff. I chose the puddles.  There was no hope of keeping feet dry anyway.  The result was that when Nathan and I arrived at the first aid station at 6.3 miles, my socks had fallen down in my shoes and my heels were already bleeding. I tried to pull up my socks but they were not budging.

The next 8.5 mile section was impressively easy.  It was about as similar to road running as wet trails could be, and largely downhill.  Nathan's easy pace is naturally faster than mine and he started inching ahead, then he would periodically wait up for me.  I needed to go to the bathroom anyway, so I thought this was a good time for us to split and each run our own race.  I took this opportunity to go to work on my socks. They would not pull up and I couldn't get a good grip.  I needed to take off my shoes if anything I did was to last more than a minute.  My hands were so numb that my fingers had lost all dexterity, so I eventually gave up struggling with my double-knotted shoelaces.  In the end, I wasted about 10 minutes and achieved nothing.  At the next aid station, I asked for band-aids (the ones I started with were long gone in the rain, which had since stopped). The band-aids, which probably took another 10 minutes for the friendly volunteer to apply, quickly fell off again and I decided that the sharp pains in my heels would simply be part of the race.

It was 7.7 miles to the next aid station.  It contained a climb, but the elevation chart had made it look so impressive that it didn't seem too bad while hiking it:

I probably went quicker than I should have on the uphill, running whenever I felt the grade was reasonable and hiking with some "umph."  I was eager to reach the next aid station though, because it had drop bags, and therefore...dry socks!  Once I arrived and found my drop bag (the struggle of this made me really appreciate my crew from past races), I changed socks and applied large bandaids to my heels.  My left sock was soaked in blood all the way done to my midfoot.  The new socks were wet again within about two minutes.  The band-aids were so heavy-duty they may have lasted a half mile.  But the key was that my new socks were too big for me and I pulled them way up, so there was no more shoe-on-skin the rest of the race.

The next section was miserable.  Absolutely incredible mud.  Mud with a mind of its own. Mud that slides intermixed with mud that slurps.

I like mud.  It gives you something to show for the day and distinguishes you from road runners.  This mud did not like me. It threatened to send me into the creek.  It left me stuck in a split with the kind runner behind me propping me up. It slammed my arm into a root when I fell later in the dark (although I do appreciate having the scrape and bruise to show off).  One runner asked me to step aside for her to pass in this mud.  I gladly did, but I had to ask, "How it is possible to run faster than I am in this?"  She shouted back, from 10 feet down the trail, that it was her shoes.  Huh. Road shoes with 500+ miles may not always be the answer.  Mercifully, we reached a point where there were leaves on top of the mud, or I would still be out there sliding around.

We climbed up a steep technical section that requires a rope to ascend, and the mud made the parts without the rope particularly harrowing.   I knew what my goal needed to be: to get back down this rope section before dark.  First there was more mud, and very narrow trail with the faster runners coming back.  It was hard to get any rhythm while having to jump off the trail every 30 seconds.  Eventually the aid station came, and there was just on quick 4.2 mile loop before last 11.8 miles of the course, which were largely the last (muddy) section in reverse.

Quick 4.2 miles.  Ha!  It went on and on.  Great trails, but I finished it thinking "That was never 4.2 miles!" a la Monty Python's "Argument Clinic."  I share this not because it's particularly witty, but because Nathan had the exact same thought when he hit this part of the course.  Talk about made for each other (or at least both brought up in households with an appreciation for British humor, I mean, British humour).

I pushed it to make it down the rope before dark.  It was so close that some of the folks who went down ahead of me already had their headlamps on, but I was able to wait to turn mine on until after reaching the bottom.  I left the last aid station around 10:39 into the race-- over 2 hours before the cut-off time of 13 hours, plenty of time to cover the last 7.5 miles.

Of course, I had been planning to run most of those miles.  My legs were tired, yes, but still up to a few miles of running.  Unfortunately, the combination of darkness, mud, and sometimes technical trails meant that it really wasn't possible to run much at all.  The pace we needed to maintain walking is quite easy on a treadmill, but in the mud it was another story.  Runners who had been strung out in singles over the previous 45 miles banded together in groups and together we marched to the finish. Considering my lack of training, I was not at all disappointed with my slowest 50 mile finish time of 12:44.  Nathan was there waiting, but I will leave him to tell you about his race.

I must have looked pretty rough at this point.  I was covering in mud and thought I had 17 "boos boos" until I discovered a few more in the shower today I missed when counting yesterday.  No pictures from immediately post-race, but here is what my heels look like 24 hours after finishing:

As I hobbled barefoot into the hotel, the security guard asked me, "Uh, ma'am, do you have a room here?"  Thankfully he didn't ask for my room number, because I could not have produced that information at the time.

In spite of the struggles, I'm very glad to have done the race. It was a welcome break from interview season and a long over-due return to ultrarunning.  As for the Kinvaras, they still have my love.  They just may not be my top pick for the next rainy trail race.

-Jordan