2018 Grindstone 100 - Is there anybody out there?

"Is there anybody out there?"

Pink Floyd, The Wall

Roger Waters asks but his haunting, echoing voice gets no response.

The song's intro is particularly appropriate for Grindstone, one of the few 100 mile races that start at 6pm instead of a more traditional early morning start.

"Well, only got an hour of daylight left. Better get started" 

"Isn't it unsafe to travel at night?" 

It was Saturday night and I was alone in rural Virginia at the top of Elliott Knob, the last major climb of the Grindstone 100. I had been steadily moving forward for 30 hours since the race started 88 miles ago. I had been awake for 42 hours since I woke up in Boston on Friday morning.

Like all the climbs of Grindstone, going up Elliott Knob was long, hard, exhilarating, and rewarding. Ascending 1,500 feet in 2.5 miles is no joke, especially at the close of a race that has 22,000 feet of going up and an equal amount of going down. Maybe the race organizers are right to call it "the hardest 100 miler east of the 100th meridian".

The course does have some flat-ish sections, though the elevation profile doesn't make it look that way

My arthritic right hip hasn't liked running since December 2017, so the vast majority of my training for Grindstone was on the stairs of Harvard Stadium. I did a 37-section "tour" of the Stadium 15+ times a week every week all summer long. Each stadium tour is 1,700' of elevation, so I figured that a daily workout of 5,000 vertical feet of climbing wouldn't make me a fast runner but would help me build the mental and physical endurance needed to conquer the Grindstone hills. 

And going up those hills, especially the 3 big ones in the 2nd half of the race, was relatively fast and fantastic. David Roche notes the importance of "minimum velocity" - how fast you go when the going gets tough late in a long race and on the big climbs. Ian Sharman says "a big part of his success is because his slowest pace is faster than [the slowest pace of] many of his competitors" and David observes that if "one athlete improves minimum velocity so they can hike at 3.6 miles per hour instead of 2.8 miles per hour, that might add up to hours faster in long races".

I don't know how fast I went up Lookout Mountain or any of the others, but it was often a lot faster than the people near me. Maybe I caught 5 people going up to Elliott Knob, maybe it was 10 or more. But it felt great and I was excited to have finished the last big climb and to have reached the beginning of the end of the race. 

But with the Elliott Knob climb done, where was I now?

Eventually I knew I should reach the same steep dirt road that we climbed in the first few miles of the race (Grindstone is an out-and-back course, so miles 50-100 were almost exactly a reverse replay of miles 1-50). But where was that road?

Not that much earlier, just after I passed the last competitor I would see going up the climb, I saw the light of a headlamp coming down the hill. Seeing someone going the opposite direction is never a good sign (Are they going back to the previous aid station injured? Are they lost? Am I lost?) and at this point late in the race it set off major alarm bells. But it wasn't a problem, it was "Paul from Chicago" who recognized me from earlier in the race when we spent a few miles on the trail together. Paul excitedly explained how he had dropped out of the race much earlier and was now about to start pacing someone else. Maybe he was backtracking to find them, I didn't exactly understand and I didn't stop to ask questions. But Paul said clearly that I was "almost there" (to the top of the climb). So when the trail leveled out I was ready to quickly find the dirt road heading downhill to the last aid station.

But I didn't find the road. The course was marked with pink ribbons and reflective strips hanging from tree branches and as I continued running (walking) I was looking and looking for the next ribbon. And every time I convinced myself that somehow I had gone off course I'd see another ribbon off in the distance. Or at least I would think I'd see another ribbon or reflector up ahead. But when I got to where I thought it was, it wasn't there. Where was that reflector marking the trail? Had it ever been there?

"The first experience looking at white, boring lichens in the night with a UV light is mind-blowing. What looks like white paint during the day, suddenly glows in the most diverse colors, ranging from bright yellow and orange to neon blue, turquoise, green, pink and purple."

- FUNGI Magazine

"Lichens aren’t bioluminescent, which is to say that if you turn out the lights, they won’t glow in the dark. Under ultraviolet light, however, many of them fluoresce, glowing vividly in ways that most humans can’t detect in normal daylight conditions."

- Canadian Museum of Nature

At some point I realized that I wasn't seeing reflective course markings and then having them disappear when I got to where I thought they were. It was glowing lichens blowing my fragile eggshell mind. My headlamp and waistlamp combined to emit a ton of light and while most of it was in the visible spectrum, maybe enough of it was UV light (10-400nm) to trigger the fluorescence that my tired mind couldn't comprehend.

Emission spectrum of a Petzl headlamp

At some point I saw glowing lichen ahead in the distance and I thought the light I saw was coming from a flashlight. Maybe the dirt road was running parallel to the trail and there was a man walking on the road. I called out to him, "HELLO!". But he didn't reply (because he wasn't there). 

At least it was warm that night. I was all alone and starting to conclude that I was lost. I covered my lights to look for someone else's lights, but there were none. But how could I be off trail? The forest was thick on both sides, where had there even been an opportunity to stray? Worse case, I could sleep by the side of the trail and figure it out in the morning. I wouldn't finish before the race's 38 hour time limit, but what else could I do? 

The only thing I could do was keep trudging along. Reaching out to touch the ribbons when I found them, using my sense of touch to confirm what I didn't fully believe from my sense of sight and trying to make sure they were really there.

This part of the story ends abruptly because all of sudden, there was the road! I wasn't lost, the course markings hadn't been vandalized, and all of my paranoia was unfounded. At this point in the race I didn't care what blisters were on my toes and heels. I sprinted down the steep steep hill (12% grade) and passed another runner or two.

It seemed to take forever to reach the aid station, and I had no recollection of this, or any other part of the course in either the direction we had traveled on Friday night or what it would be like now going in the other direction.

The Grindstone race course starts on a Boy Scout camp, does a few miles on State of Virginia land, then moves into the George Washington National Forest for the majority of the race. In the Virginia section the race director was not allowed to use pink & reflective streamers to mark the course. Instead there were white rectangles painted on trees. This was fine on Friday evening when the race had just started, it wasn't dark yet, I wasn't exhausted, and there other runners in sight to follow just as much as I was following the trail marked with white rectangles.

At midnight or so on Saturday night/Sunday morning when I was alone, tired, and disoriented, it was a whole different game. I didn't get lost, but it sure was slow going for those last few miles to the finish. This wasn't a Random Walk Down Wall Street, but it was a couple hours of haphazard stumble through the forest.

Twenty four hours earlier, I was seriously doubting this whole endeavor. My strong power-hiking had me squarely in the middle of the pack after the climb up to Elliott Knob (mile 10). But in the long, relatively flat sections that followed I was passed again and again and again by long trains of people who were jogging faster than I could or wanted to go. So I spent a lot of time by myself in the dark knowing that I had 70 or 80 miles in front of me and few, if any, of the other 256 people who had started the race behind me on the course. If I had happened upon an aid station at this point, maybe it would have been hard to leave it and get back out on the course. But I guess that by the time I got to that next aid station I was starting to feel better.

Saturday's sun rise was a change for the better. My motto for the ~12 hours of daylight was "every second counts", because every mile I got done during the daylight was one less hour that I'd need to deal with that night. Grindstone's 6pm start time really is special.

I almost even-split the race, which I am more and more convinced is a great way to do these long races. It does take discipline to go slow in the first half but I think it greatly increases the likelihood of finishing the race. I did the first 50 miles in 15 hrs 45 min which had me in 184th place. I did the 2nd half in 15 hrs 52 min and moved up 78 places.

Some random thoughts to clear the docket

• There was a scale and weigh-in at check-in on Friday afternoon. But I was never weighed or saw a scale during the race
• The spiraling downhill from Reddish Knob to the turn-around aid station felt endless, but eventually it did end
• After the Friday afternoon pre-race briefing I thought it would make sense to sleep in the car for a couple hours. I parked in the far back corner of the big field that was being used as a makeshift parking lot. I may have even remembered to bring an eye mask. But it seems that everyone else thought of the afternoon as a time to visit, chat, and not be super quiet. Earplugs would have been nice to have
• No AT&T cell service at the starting area
• Just after the start after you go around the small pond, the course switches from wide grass path to single-track. Be prepared for a bit of a traffic jam at this transition point.
• I forgot to bring flip-flops to Massanutten to wear the day after the race when my feet really didn't want to be in shoes. Remembering them for Grindstone was better.
• At Massanutten I slipped and fell onto one of my hiking poles and had to patch it together with duct tape and sticks. Not breaking poles at Grindstone was better.