It’s important to test yourself every once in a while, to see
just how real your dreams are, or how false the extent to which you believe you
have capacity may be. At least this notion is important for me and I find that
each time I am deliberate about this exploration I have new insights that
emerge which are relevant to my daily life, and can serve to inform decisions I
make on how to use my time and energy - - and where not to.
I was fortunate to be part of a great event this weekend, Oct
9-10th, 2016, called the Lake Tahoe Midnight Express. It was a
72-mile ultra marathon put on by Les Wright, the ring leader. I talked to Les
at the orientation on Saturday afternoon and he said he’s been in Tahoe for 30
years. Les has pulled together a series of events that draw a great cast of
characters interested in various outdoor adventures. The Tahoe Marathon is a
major draw which was held on Sunday, Oct 9th at 9am. If a marathon isn’t
enough, or isn’t the right flavor of fun, Les also hosts other options to add
on or participate in ala carte. There are stand up paddle board races, kayak
races, and other options. For those wanting to do something a bit harder, which
is what I was after this weekend, there are options that will push any athlete
to their limit. The Tahoe Triple is 3 marathons in three days. I did this a
number of years ago and it was amazing. My goal this weekend was a 72-mile run,
navigating around the perimeter of Lake Tahoe and intersecting with
participants in various other events, either on the race course as we overlapped
routes, or on and about the town as we prepared for and celebrated our
accomplishments.
The first portion of the race consisted of a mandatory
orientation at 4pm on Saturday. I showed up to a small conference meeting room
at the Lake Tahoe Resort – the kind of room I’m usually speaking in or hosting
client meetings for work. There were about 13 people, including a few crew
members, in attendance. I didn’t know how big of a field to expect but noticed
that from past year’s race results, there were usually between 10-20 finishers.
Suffice it to say, this is one of the smaller racing cohorts one encounters. It
was refreshing, as are most ultra marathons, to not be in the middle of a big
commercial event. These are people who want a certain experience of general
solitude. Les clearly enjoys fostering these experiences and he borrowed a map
of the lake from a fellow runner, who had bought one at the expo, and unrolled
it on the floor. While on his hands and knees, he told us about the course. It
was about 5 minutes of advice on where to turn, to ensure that we clicked on
our lights at dark, and to casually ask if anyone had questions. One runner
asked if she could start earlier than the 9pm gun. Three additional runners
said they would like to as well, and with that the official race time changed
to 8pm. I started mentally calculating that with 60 minutes less before
go-time, I still had to have dinner, take a nap, and get race ready. I was glad
we were starting earlier but the reality of the starting line looming that much
closer was an awakening.
Before adjourning the orientation, Les asked if everyone had a
crew. Ah hem, “I don’t and I really would like to have someone’s number in case
I run into an emergency”, I said. Then 3 more runners said they needed help
from a crew as well. Thomas was there crewing for his wife Vanessa, who is an
altogether different breed who had already run a marathon the day before, and
that morning, and was about to do the 72-miler. He was kind enough to offer his
service to both me and another runner. We traded numbers and fifteen minutes
after the meeting began we were on our to individually prepare for the start
which was just under four hours away.
I went to the hotel restaurant for my last supper. The menu had
a nice grass-fed burger so I ordered it with accompanying sweet potato fries
and an iced tea. This is what runners eat before a race, right? I ate as
quickly as possible and headed to my car in the parking lot for a nap in the
passenger seat with my feet up on the dash. With my phone alarm set for 7pm, I
figured I had an hour to sleep before getting dressed. I turned on some music
and drifted away for an hour. The alarm was a rude awakening because the sunset
had come and gone while I was asleep, and there I was in the middle of a hotel
casino parking lot, staring at the dark, wiping the sleep from my eyes. It was
time to rally.
I opened the trunk of my car and unpacked my gear. It was a
daunting logistical task to be done in the dark. Normally my amazing wife is my
crew on events like this, meaning she labors through endless hours of boredom
driving my essentials (food, water, clothes, motivational support) up the road
every 5 or so miles. On this one, I decided to try the run unassisted. I had
arrived in Tahoe on Friday and went for a 2.5 mile run to test the air, my
gear, and the temperature. With these localized trials in mind, I calculated
what to wear, at which temperature, and how often I should store my food along
the route. I went to Safeway and bought $90 worth of groceries (nearly all of
which I ate during the race, just to give a sense of the calorie consumption)
and packed it into five drop bags. My plan was to stash the food and some extra
dry clothes in various ditches or hiding places along the way. On the night
before the race I had a dream with a great idea, so put it into play on
Saturday morning. I sought out the 24-hour businesses on the course and asked
their front counter for a favor of holding my food cooler and clothes. As I
stood at the trunk of my car I mentally calculated what I needed to carry on my
back versus what I had planted along the way earlier that day.
The first stash I had planted was 27 miles away from the start
at a Casino between the California / Nevada Stateline on the north side of the
lake. Imagine walking into a casino with a cooler and running shoes and asking
for an “odd favor”. The hostess looked at me sideways as if I was an alien. She
could not comprehend running around the lake, nor could she wrap her head
around where to store my food. I had to say, “If it makes you uncomfortable
don’t worry about it, I can go up the road”. She finally figured out a way to
help and agreed to hold my gear in the Lost and Found. She called a security
guard to help me who had her own reaction as to why someone would intentionally
put something in the Lost and Found. It was so clear in my mind why I would
need their help, yet so foreign to them. I guess this was a moment of insight
for me, just how odd what I was about to do actually is to most people.
The next stash was at a hotel called “Basecamp” in Tahoe City.
They didn’t have a 24x7 lobby but let me place my items on their outdoor patio.
I tucked them behind some orange cones with a note that said, “If you find this
please leave these items here, I am relying on them to run around Lake Tahoe
tonight”. Basically this was a pity plea for any drunk hotel guests who might
think it funny to eat my food or otherwise taint the stash. This drop location
was 10 miles from the casino, which seemed like a good distance to reload.
The third and fourth stashes were in more remote areas of
wilderness. One of them was in somebody’s roadside yard, where they had piles
of cut firewood logs underneath tarps to keep it dry. I lifted the tarp and
placed another drop bag, with another note, under it. This was again 10 miles
from the previous. I kept this pattern up for another 2 stashes.
To make the logistics a bit more difficult, the temperature at
start time was abourt47 degrees and was forecasted to drop to 32 degrees by
6am, then climb to 70 degrees the next day before my estimated finish time.
This meant that I needed various clothes along the way. On Saturday morning I
mapped my pace compared to the weather forecast and anticipated which clothes I
would change into at which drop location.
Back at the trunk of my car with now 45 minutes until race time,
and with all of these logistics in mind, I was really having trouble deciding
what to actually wear. I ruffled chaotically through my duffle bag and settled
on long pants and a long t-shirt. I had purchased the Salomon Skin-Lab 12 as a
running backpack I would wear, which both would hold my water, food to get me
between my drop locations, a few extra clothes, and necessary provisions. I
loaded the pack with a 70 oz bladder of water and filled 4 soft flasks (water
bottles) with 17 oz of water each. I had made 15 sandwiches for my drop bags
and kept 3 of them for my starting pack. I put my running cap and headlamp on,
extra batteries, toilet paper, Vaseline, band aids, electrolyte supplements,
and phone in their respective packets. All I needed to do next was don my GPS
watch and get to the start. As I looked around however, I couldn’t find my
watch. I panicked a bit but then noticed a fellow runner who parked next to me
also getting ready. I didn’t want to look like a panicked crazy man, so I just
let it go and met the fellow runner, to start without my watch. I found it
later in the car and was pleased to meet David from Florida, a fellow
e-Learning careerist.
After one last bathroom stop, I got to the start line, tied my
shoes, and the race director had us take a group photo before nonchalantly
saying, “Ok, you can go”. Another runner turned on my blinking red light on my
back and with that, we ran off into the darkness leaving the South Lake Tahoe
Stateline (casino area) heading north, counter-clockwise around the late.
Before we got into the darkness, however, we had about a mile of getting
through the city streets. At 8pm, the normal tourists are heading out to their
night on the town for gambling, drinking, and other fun things that sounded
like a better idea at the time. Some cheered, others were annoyed, but
eventually we got off into the dark.
I like to chunk my races up into bite-sized segments. The first
13 miles was my first bite. After this half marathon segment, we would end at
the top of Spooner summit. It’s a rolling, if marginal incline most of the way,
and then the climb to the summit goes for about 2.5 miles. I personally enjoyed
that it was pitch black, because I couldn’t see the hill in front of me. I
remained happy about this fact until sunrise at 7am, preferring to grind out
each step without really knowing what hill I was actually climbing. I had
mapped out the mile by mile elevation on paper and it was in my pocket, but
without my GPS watch it really didn’t mean much. In retrospect, I am happy
about not having my watch because while I came into the event with the big
picture in mind, not having the mileage to elevation overlay made me simply
focus on how I was feeling and what was going on in the present. This was a big
insight for me, that knowing the big picture is important but acting in the
moment is often more powerful. Indeed this might have been what made me finish
at all.
During these first 13 miles, each runner varied their pace a bit
and had some idle chatter, getting to know where people are from and mentally
sizing up their pace to see if they may be a good running partner for some of
the race. I ran a few miles with David, who happened to be the guy parked next
to me in the lot before the race. He has done really cool things with the
Blackboard technology including writing a book and developing mobile
applications. He came with two other friends, who I didn’t get a chance to talk
to except for a head nod and handshake at the orientation. I eventually settled
into a pace with another runner, Susie from Seattle. We ran approximately 20
miles together and the conversation kept me from thinking too much about the
early stages of fatigue that naturally begin to set in. Every time I do an
event like this I am amazed at the people I meet. Susie was no exception. A
neurologist from Washington state, she has organized her life to work four days
per week so she can travel every weekend to a race. For nearly the whole twenty
miles, she shared stories about all of her ultra races and marathons ranging
from Capetown to Scotland to most of the majors in the US. She has done 190
marathons and 90 ultramarathons. She was also there with her crewmate, Max, who
adopted me for about the first thirty miles. Max would drive up every five
miles and be waiting with a smile, water, food, and provisions. Around mile
twenty, I stopped to grab water from another crew member and Susie kept
running. By the time I got back on the road, I could not catch Susie and didn’t
get a chance to see her again in the race or at the finish, although looking at
results she came in about 10 min behind me. Max let me know around mile 30 that
she had missed a turn. The people who had helped me with water turned out to be
from Coon Rapids, MN. As I welcomed their water the crew member Jen noticed my
Twin Cities Marathon T-Shirt and we made the connection. She said her husband
Eric was coming up the road and that I could run with him. I waited for a
minute for him to catch up, and realized he was running far faster than me. He
blew past me and kept going – I later learned that he won the race. He also
hadn’t heard about the start time changing from 9pm to 8pm, so by mile twenty
he had already made up an hour on me. Amazing. These transient connections
during a race like this are common and enjoyable. People drift in and out of
your race and give you a boost when you need it, and you hope you do the same
for them. Another life insight about the journey being so important and how the
meaningful things involve getting to know people, their stories, and sharing
parts of yourself and your experience with others who are doing the same.
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| In the Casino |
At mile 27 I pulled into that Casino which was holding my food
and clothes. It was about 3am when I staggered out of the dark 35 degree
weather and into the flashing lights of the casino through the front door. If
not for my running clothes and headlamp I may have looked the same as the
gambling patrons – tired, rugged, beat down, out of luck. I forgot to turn the
light off, and as I meandered through the craps tables, that same sideways look
the hostess gave me earlier in the day was shot at my in all directions. I
convinced the next shift security guard that it was ok to give me my items, and
explained that after I refilled my bottles and loaded sandwiches into my pack,
I would need them to hold my items again. It was funny. When I had dropped my
gear originally, I wasn’t fully confident I would be able to get it, so I hid a
thermos of chicken broth behind the bushes on the side of the casino. I stopped
by that bush and guzzled 20-ounces of warm broth before hitting the streets
again. Chicken broth can bring new life to you when you are down trodden –
highly recommended!
Five miles up the road I had buried three water bottles near a
fence, under some field grass. Right when I got to the location I came upon two
more fellow runners. I excused myself while I ran to the ditch and got the
bottles. Then I caught back up to Matt and George and again found the power of
drifting into and sharing a journey with others. Matt had registered the week
before and George was out to prove himself on the course. George and I spent a
big chunk of the remaining 40 miles together. His brother Linh and friend Eric
were kind enough to adopt me next. I parted from George for a bit when I got to
the basecamp hotel, my second food stash. He kept running and I reloaded my
gear, and then crossed the street to Safeway, which I was pleasantly surprised
to see open. I figured at 37 miles in, a bathroom would be welcomed and
cleaning my hands with some soap and water to get the sticky food washed off
would feel nice. I bought a bottle of Pepsi (which I didn’t know was actually
still a brand for sale) and then headed back out into the night. It was about
4:30am. I wanted to catch George to have some conversation, but it took me
about 8 miles of pushing the pace to make up for the time I lost during my
stop. I came up to him about 3 miles short of Homewood, where the Sunday
morning start of the Lake Tahoe marathon was. The temperature was dropping
right around sunrise, between 6-7am. We ran together and had great discussion
for another 13 miles. He thought it was funny that I was storing my food along
the way like a squirrel. We past the start line of the marathon about 30 min
before it began, so saw a lot of the aid stations just popping up. It was great
to have water and small food items every 2 miles from this point through to the
end. I had planned on this, so didn’t stash anything in the final 26.2 miles
except a hidden coconut water which I shared with George. Matt caught up to us
around this point and seemed to be getting new life in his legs.
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| George and I meeting back up at the finish line |
At 54 miles in, we hit the “Hill from Hell”. It was 1.5 miles
long and quite steep. I power walked most of it which seemed to be a good
strategy because I was passing people who were trying to run/walk it, and when
I got to the top I felt great. I stopped at a restroom and Matt and George kept
going. I caught them again and we enjoyed the summit of this big hill. We got
to an aid station for water and I pulled to the side to get my water packs
filled. It seemed to take so long that I thought Matt and George had already
hit the trail again. I was feeling good and thought I saw George down the road,
so picked up the pace and decided to throw down the hammer. When I finally
reached “George” I realized it wasn’t him. I would later find out that I had
left them at the last aid station.
The next segment was a climb up to the most amazing view of the
race, Inspiration Point on Emerald Bay. It was the last hill of the race and
when we summited, the rest of the race was downhill.
While at the summit I met Jennifer, who was doing the Tahoe
Triple. She was really moving fast but we talked a bit and she offered words of
encouragement before leaving me in the dust. She ended up winning the triple,
which meant she was the fastest person to run 3 marathons in three days around
the lake. What an amazing accomplishment.
I descended the next few miles into the last 10-miles, which was
the flattest portion of the course. I was clearly suffering about this time and
had text Bethany that I was falling apart. She has Grace and Silvia send me a
video of encouragement. It really helps to see your 5-year old and 2 ½ year old
send you a “go daddy go” message. I tried to rally, which meant breaking from
the now walking pace into a jog as often as I could. Then another drifter
floated into my journey and I met Stephanie, who was also doing the triple. By
this time the majority of the regular marathon runners had past us so the
running crowd was thinning. Stephanie was kind enough to encourage me to start
running again and we ended up doing a run/walk effort together through the end
of the race. I’m pretty sure I cost her about 20 minutes on her race, but we
kept moving through the Tahoe Keys and even found an aid station offering beer
shots, and another with wine. With about 6 miles left in the race my phone
started exploding with people offering words of encouragement. I later realized
that Bethany had posted to our friends that I needed some encouragement, which
I did. For the next miles I couldn’t keep up with the number of awesome texts
coming my way. It kept my mind off the pain and focused on the end goal.
Stephanie took off to the finish with 1-mile left and I reveled, as I always
do, in the glory of the last mile. At this point, for me, I get to reflect on
the efforts and enjoy the moment of accomplishment. I finally crossed the line
in 17 hours and 37 minutes of running. Stephanie and Jennifer were waiting for
me and I found out they were best friends. I waited for George and his crew and
we celebrated his finish. We ate hot dogs and had $1 beer and gathered our
t-shirts and medals. Somehow I missed Susie, who I saw from the results had
finished just minutes behind me.
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| Mexican Food, Tequila, and Fire with New Friends Post Race |
The beauty of the lake laid out upon us,
and finishing at the place it all started the day before, made it all worth the
effort. To show up and test yourself against your limits is so important, and
to share the journey with people who are doing the same thing is what, for me,
these events are all about. Thanks to my family, old friends and new ones, who
who helped support me along the journey.
