Barkley 2018: One Official Loop
Oh boy.
I finally ran my first attempt at the Barkley Marathons this past weekend. (Watch the movie first if you don't know what I'm talking about.) It lived up to the hype. The weather was gnarly, the course was awesome, and I had the time of my life (on loop one).
I've dreamt about the race for years, and I have been applying since the 2013 race, maybe missing one year. I got on the waitlist for 2016, and as is the practice, moved my way up over the last couple years. I started in spot seven this year, and was accepted into the race mid-February. Unfortunately, I was unable to train much, because I was on the economics PhD job market. I wrapped up a long 2017 running season in the fall, and essentially took November, December, and January off, running only ~100 miles per month. Instead I finished up drafts of two papers, submitted one to a journal, sent the other to 130 employers, interviewed with a dozen, and flew to visit four. Finally, after the second-round interviews, I was able to start real training on February 10. This is not enough time to train for Barkley. However, having applied, my turn was up, and I was happy to treat myself to the race as a reward for another attempt on the job market and the conclusion of my work at UC Berkeley.
In my four serious weeks of training I ran 294 miles. More importantly, I got 82,600 vertical feet of climbing. I did repeats on the Claremont ridge, repeats on the Tamalpais firebreaks, and a day on Diablo. I only got four weeks in, but being systematic about it felt really good. Just get up, pack the gym bag, get on BART, work all day, run from the top of Dwight in the dark, go home, and do it all over again. Just remember to charge the flashlight. George enjoyed the training too, since I took him to work on Tuesdays so we can drive up to the Berkeley Running Club runs, and he's allowed on most of Tam, including the steepest parts.
My last run of any consequence before the race was a 19-miler in the rain with 3,700 feet of climbing on March 13. Saturday the 17th I started having throat pain and trouble sleeping (was it the funky produce from Gross-Out (Grocery Outlet)?), Sunday I thought I had the flu, and Monday it settled in that I had a full-blown cold. Wednesday, Amy and I flew to Nashville and drove to Frozen Head. Three to four inches of snow blanketed the picnic table in our campsite, but thankfully it had mostly melted from the ground. It was in the low forties, and I alternated between shivering and hacking up a lung. Thursday I bought my park maps from the park headquarters and went for a short training run, scouting the first two miles or so of the course. (You're not allowed to scout any of the off-trail portions of the race, which is most of it.) The rest of the day I sat around camp with six layers on, but no puffy, so I was still cold. On the plus side, we went into town for Mexican with a few other runners, and I was shocked at how cheap everything was--veggie fajitas for $8!
Friday we hung around camp, and around 3:00 turned in my license plate, got my first bib number (31) and the course directions, and then copied the course map. Scott Martin and I read through most of the course directions together, noting changes: Book 1 on England Mountain was back to its original location, Leonard's Butt Slide was much harder, going all the way to the New River, and we'd be doing loops two and three counter-clockwise. I sorted my gear and got to sleep early. Or, I tried to, and then I went around asking several RVers to turn off their generators, because give me a break. (Laz often makes the course more difficult, or adds rules that clarify, but also usually make the race harder. I'd be cool with a no RVs rule. A van is plenty, or you can suffer in a tent with us pleebs and not keep everyone up all night.)
The conch woke me up at perfectly civilized time of 8:33AM. I got dressed, pooped, picked up my race watch (Laz started providing everyone with a mandatory timepiece so no one uses GPS or anything fancy), and grabbed my gear. Then I was aghast that my crew had changed the time on my racewatch to accurately reflect the time of day (Laz set them all to hit midnight at race start time) but that was a crisis easily averted. I almost always overdress at the start and then quickly overheat and have to stop and strip layers, but I tried to avoid that--jacket already around the waist instead of wearing it.
Bald Knob is pretty easy clockwise, so we hit that right on. The candy-ass trail to the garden spot is easy, but you're supposed to leave it for a few hundred yards at a bench with coal ponds, which I would have missed without Nicki. (This little diversion off maintained trail is short and easy to miss, perhaps like the section David Horton and Blake Wood messed up when they finished-but-also-got-DQ'd.) We got the Garden Spot book together, and then there were at least six to ten people all in the vicinity of Leonard's Buttslide. Crossing all the roads was confusing, but I benefited from others having searched for several minutes for the old house foundation where the book now is before I arrived. I nailed the climb up to book six, hitting the table rock right on. I got a bit ahead of people on the descent to the New River, doing the Testacle Spectacle climb alone. I was pretty good on the descent to Raw Dog Falls, only having to backtrack a bit on the road to, as the rules dictate, climb to the point where I was in line with the falls. However, from there I just stayed on the road too long and almost went all the way out to Meth Lab Hill instead of crossing the stream and finding Danger Dave's Climbing Wall and the Barrel Book. Eventually I found it, but that meant that the group behind me (Nicki Rehn, Liz Canty) mostly passed me. The climb up Pighead Creek and the Prison Mine Trail is straightforward, and then Rat Jaw is an out and back, so I saw them all there heading down as I was heading up.
I burned another few minutes at the prison tunnel, in retrospect a very obvious place. The directions say the tunnel starts at the northeast corner, but I'd really call it the east corner. Or just "the totally totally obvious place right where you come down the powerline cut--don't try and circle the outside of the prison wall because there's a bunch of concertina wire that says you can't." I eventually figured that out, got my book, and made my way up Indian Knob. On the way up, Dewayne Satterfield, Kaz Williams (the human sacrifice), Gabriel Szerda, and Stephanie Case, caught up to me, and we all caught up to one other guy from the group ahead (you know, just some guy on US 24-hour distance team whose name I can't remember, no biggy). Dewayne was a huge help finding our way through The Eye of the Needle, and it was nice that there were other people there for the start of serious rain, serious cold, and dark. We descended and passed Gary, Guillaume, and Allie heading the opposite direction. Dewayne was also a big help finding the Beech Tree Hollow book, and then we all trudged up Big Hell, hitting the Chimney Top book dead on. The rain was coming down really heavily, but I had a waist-mounted light with me that was a lifesaver, with way less glare in fog than my headlamp, which I was also carrying. After getting on trail at Chimney Top we passed Johan and then shortly my buddy Scott, and then I bombed down the trails, dropping everyone else behind me. Passing through the campsite I screamed for Amy to bring all my stuff to the bathroom, and I finished loop one in 12:47.
Interloopally, Amy and our friend Jenny (Spike) brought all my stuff to the very nice central bathroom. (I had not read about the park bathroom, but really, it's very nice. Electricity and free hot showers.) I changed all my top layers, putting on a t-shirt, long sleeved t-shirt, a thick Patagonia fleece, and a brand new REI alpine thickness hardshell. I tied my old Montbell hardshell around my waist because why not, and a rain skirt to keep some rain off my midsection felt like a good idea at the time. I stupidly switched out of a glove system that was working fine, switched batteries, scarfed a ramen, and headed back out at around 13:07.
Many thanks to Amy and Jenny for getting me back on course so quickly and for putting up with the general grumpiness.
After Indian Knob we descended to the prison, which was confusing because the lights in the valley are (mostly) not the prison, but they're tempting to head towards. We still hit it pretty close, and it was a very easy course correction at the bottom. We got the book there, and then, holy shit, the prison tunnel. The mild little stream was raging, and I didn't think it looked particularly safe. Freezing cold class three rapids down a concrete ramp through a tunnel under a prison in the middle of the night was more like it. But Gabriel is heavier, so he went first, and said it was alright, so we all shuffled through, making sure to squeeze through the side of the gate on the far end so we wouldn't get swept off the edge into the outflow pool. (I heard later one runner did get swept off his feet and slid the whole tunnel up to his neck in water.) We took a break and climbed Rat Jaw. The fog rolled in so thick we veered off-course on a power line cut. Again: fog so thick we had trouble following a mowed powerline cut straight up a hill. By the top I realized I had almost completely lost my voice (remember I started with a cold), and I started to think I wouldn't finish loop two. I told Gabe and Steph that I couldn't talk anymore, so I occasionally started blowing the whistle on my pack and pointing whenever I noticed anything important.
Pighead descent was easy enough, and I found the barrel book and helped us get around Dave's Climbing Wall. On the way up I told Gabe and Steph that I wasn't going to make it the whole way. I felt like I was going so slowly that they'd eventually drop me, but they really weren't any faster. They were out of sight for a minute down Testacle Spectacle, but I caught them at the book. We crossed the New River and climbed to Fyke's Peak Crater, and I decided I was done. Gabe kept saying "we have room" in the group, but I had come up with enough excuses. I had a big presentation at work. (God, how cliche is that?) Basically, I was flying out from Nashville Monday at 4pm, and I thought that if I spent all Sunday out on the trails, I wouldn't be able to do my work presentation on Tuesday. Kind of stupid, but maybe not--I expect a lot of people didn't fly out until Tuesday, and were smart enough not to schedule brand new lessons about multiple hypothesis testing for Tuesday afternoon. Also, I felt like shit, had eaten maybe 1,000 calories in the previous 24 hours, and had run out of water. I put on my hardshell jacket and pants and was still cold. So after 8 of 13 books counterclockwise, I skipped Leonard's Buttslide and walked a flat road straight to book 10. Halfway there I found some road runoff water that was running clear, so I sat down and flushed a few handfuls of Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels down the gullet. I immediately considered reversing course and finishing the loop. After multiple back and forths, I figured I'd just skip one book (Leonard's Buttslide) and get the rest. So I continued along the road and got the Garden Spot book. (This road, which connects Fyke's Peak Crater to the Garden Spot without any descent, isn't on the map, but friends did detailed Google Earth research and I learned about it from them. I wonder what I would have done if I hadn't known it was there. Maybe still quit at the Garden Spot, since the course directions clearly point out the access to Quitter's Road from there.)
After Garden Spot I was feeling good, ready to do three more climbs (one on candy-ass trail, two big off trail). I stripped off layers and started running the candy-ass trail, easily finding the coal ponds ledge I mentioned above and reconnecting to the trail. The trail contours around Bald Knob instead of hitting the summit, so as soon as the switchbacks stopped, I knew the hill to my left was Bald Knob. I went due south and hit a bench. I was a little surprised to see a campsite with picnic benches, but no matter. I was a little surprised that the summit was still another short away, but no matter. I reached the summit, and couldn't find the remnant of a capstone that Laz mentions in the directions, but no matter. The book is under a large rock ten feet from a large tree (not the most helpful description in a forest!) so I started flipping rocks. I then spent maybe an hour flipping over rocks. I got tired of flipping over rocks so I started standing them vertically on their edge so I could tell from a distance which I had already checked. But there was no book there. Despair and anger set in, and I quit (again). I headed north to reconnect to the trail, only I very quickly hit a road...and realized I'd been searching on Squire Knob instead of Blad Knob! Dammit. A glance at the map made the mistake obvious--Squire Knob is east of Bald Knob, so when you're coming counter clockwise, you're actually looking for the second knob you contour around, not the first.
I was too demoralized at this point to do serious offtrail navigation, and I slowly made my way down Quitter's Road to the yellow gate. I think I came in around 27 hours. I was upset, so I waved off some of the camera operators who were stationed at the Quitter's Road/Bird Mountain Trail junction. To my surprise, the first voice I heard cheering me to the gate was Scott Martin, since I didn't know he'd dropped shortly into loop two. Laz told me that with 8 books I was currently the lead American (Gary, Guillaume, and Allie are Canadian, French, and Scottish) but I knew that wouldn't last, since 7 more people would come in over the next several hours with all their loop two pages (all well over the time limit).
My face was numb, I ate some ramen and potato chips, started coughing a lot, and took a nap. Allie and Johan came in (in the wrong direction) from loop three. I turned in early, but most everyone else waited by the campfire for Gary and Guillaume, the two remaining runners on loop three. Gary was a few minutes over the cutoff to continue on loop four, but was credited with a fun run. Guillaume didn't come in until Monday morning--he had all his books but was lost in the fog on England Mountain for eight hours until he could find his way back to camp. So that was that. The course won. Only one fun run finisher, and no runners even started loop four. Monday morning we packed up. I gave a book I'd just finished "The Stranger in the Woods" to Laz, in hopes he uses it on the course next year. His parting words to me were "I only wish you were still out there suffering." We had breakfast at Angie's, drove to Nashville, and flew to DC. Tuesday morning I presented, with basically no voice, at the Inter-American Development Bank.
I can't wait to go back.
The course was obviously very difficult, but I do think the brambles are overblown. It's just green briar! I'll take sparse eastern green briar over western blackberries and mountain whitethorn any day! Granted, on the powerline cuts, the brambles get much, much larger, but most years those are mowed. Of course, I had the benefit of running in a cold year so full-length tights were an easy choice. In a hot year, knee-high socks or compression sleeves would be a wise choice. Having just said that the brambles aren't a big deal, it does add up, such that if you want to be able to run more than one loop at top speed, you're probably going to need to protect your shins.
I can't imagine doing any part of this race without trekking poles. I typically don't like trekking poles on downhills, feeling they throw off my balance a bit (I'd always put them away for downhills at Hardrock) but I didn't put them away a single time at Barkley. They helped keep me upright on a few descents, but I probably should have put them away. I just used my cheap Cascade Mountain Tech carbon fiber poles, which are harder to stow than folding ones like Black Diamond's. (See Skurka's analysis.) Eventually I'll get a Black Diamond set and a new pack so that I can stow them on the fly.
Fingerless bike gloves seem standard for Barkley. Since I use trekking poles so infrequently I got big thumb blisters, preventable with any full glove. If it were too hot for gloves I'd just hope to remember to tape my thumb next time.
I wore a pair of La Sportiva Ultra Raptors. La Sportiva really seems like the predominant choice in events like this--they've got good grip and they're beefy enough to protect your feet off trail. Gaiters were nice to have, and I was really glad I bothered to super glue the velcro bit onto the back of my La Sportivas so the gaiters stayed in place.
Lastly, monkey butt. I chafed really bad., which I wasn't expecting in tights, but I don't run in them that often, so what do I know? I've been trying Squirrel Nut Butter for a while, having gotten a bunch of it free from races, but it doesn't work nearly as well as Body Glide.
I finally ran my first attempt at the Barkley Marathons this past weekend. (Watch the movie first if you don't know what I'm talking about.) It lived up to the hype. The weather was gnarly, the course was awesome, and I had the time of my life (on loop one).
I've dreamt about the race for years, and I have been applying since the 2013 race, maybe missing one year. I got on the waitlist for 2016, and as is the practice, moved my way up over the last couple years. I started in spot seven this year, and was accepted into the race mid-February. Unfortunately, I was unable to train much, because I was on the economics PhD job market. I wrapped up a long 2017 running season in the fall, and essentially took November, December, and January off, running only ~100 miles per month. Instead I finished up drafts of two papers, submitted one to a journal, sent the other to 130 employers, interviewed with a dozen, and flew to visit four. Finally, after the second-round interviews, I was able to start real training on February 10. This is not enough time to train for Barkley. However, having applied, my turn was up, and I was happy to treat myself to the race as a reward for another attempt on the job market and the conclusion of my work at UC Berkeley.
In my four serious weeks of training I ran 294 miles. More importantly, I got 82,600 vertical feet of climbing. I did repeats on the Claremont ridge, repeats on the Tamalpais firebreaks, and a day on Diablo. I only got four weeks in, but being systematic about it felt really good. Just get up, pack the gym bag, get on BART, work all day, run from the top of Dwight in the dark, go home, and do it all over again. Just remember to charge the flashlight. George enjoyed the training too, since I took him to work on Tuesdays so we can drive up to the Berkeley Running Club runs, and he's allowed on most of Tam, including the steepest parts.
My last run of any consequence before the race was a 19-miler in the rain with 3,700 feet of climbing on March 13. Saturday the 17th I started having throat pain and trouble sleeping (was it the funky produce from Gross-Out (Grocery Outlet)?), Sunday I thought I had the flu, and Monday it settled in that I had a full-blown cold. Wednesday, Amy and I flew to Nashville and drove to Frozen Head. Three to four inches of snow blanketed the picnic table in our campsite, but thankfully it had mostly melted from the ground. It was in the low forties, and I alternated between shivering and hacking up a lung. Thursday I bought my park maps from the park headquarters and went for a short training run, scouting the first two miles or so of the course. (You're not allowed to scout any of the off-trail portions of the race, which is most of it.) The rest of the day I sat around camp with six layers on, but no puffy, so I was still cold. On the plus side, we went into town for Mexican with a few other runners, and I was shocked at how cheap everything was--veggie fajitas for $8!
Friday we hung around camp, and around 3:00 turned in my license plate, got my first bib number (31) and the course directions, and then copied the course map. Scott Martin and I read through most of the course directions together, noting changes: Book 1 on England Mountain was back to its original location, Leonard's Butt Slide was much harder, going all the way to the New River, and we'd be doing loops two and three counter-clockwise. I sorted my gear and got to sleep early. Or, I tried to, and then I went around asking several RVers to turn off their generators, because give me a break. (Laz often makes the course more difficult, or adds rules that clarify, but also usually make the race harder. I'd be cool with a no RVs rule. A van is plenty, or you can suffer in a tent with us pleebs and not keep everyone up all night.)
The conch woke me up at perfectly civilized time of 8:33AM. I got dressed, pooped, picked up my race watch (Laz started providing everyone with a mandatory timepiece so no one uses GPS or anything fancy), and grabbed my gear. Then I was aghast that my crew had changed the time on my racewatch to accurately reflect the time of day (Laz set them all to hit midnight at race start time) but that was a crisis easily averted. I almost always overdress at the start and then quickly overheat and have to stop and strip layers, but I tried to avoid that--jacket already around the waist instead of wearing it.
Loop 1
Laz lit his cigarette at 9:33 and we were off. I was just in front of Mike Wardian, who I met at Hardrock last year. We were in a line of at least ten up the Bird Mountain switchbacks. The group thinned out a little along the England Mountain ridge and through Fangorn Forest, but it was still just easy following all the way to book one in 42 minutes. Since there was a line to get my page, people disappeared quickly. I saw a few people drop off down the bench, but I couldn't quite tell where people went, and I probably dropped off the ridge too soon. I probably needed to be angled a little more east. I traversed a bit and came down probably near where I was supposed to, but I followed the creek a bit in the wrong direction. After maybe 5 minutes wasted I turned around, and there were a half dozen people around the creek, and I found a boundary sign, but never found the boundary trail. We just climbed straight up to the desired ridge. Others were confident enough to drop right off, but I looked around for the laurel trees to verify my location. After finding them, I dropped solo nearly straight to book two. I was basically on top of it, but couldn't find it until the group of a few had come back upstream a bit to meet me. Veteran Nicki Rehn was already leading a few virgins, and I joined them.Bald Knob is pretty easy clockwise, so we hit that right on. The candy-ass trail to the garden spot is easy, but you're supposed to leave it for a few hundred yards at a bench with coal ponds, which I would have missed without Nicki. (This little diversion off maintained trail is short and easy to miss, perhaps like the section David Horton and Blake Wood messed up when they finished-but-also-got-DQ'd.) We got the Garden Spot book together, and then there were at least six to ten people all in the vicinity of Leonard's Buttslide. Crossing all the roads was confusing, but I benefited from others having searched for several minutes for the old house foundation where the book now is before I arrived. I nailed the climb up to book six, hitting the table rock right on. I got a bit ahead of people on the descent to the New River, doing the Testacle Spectacle climb alone. I was pretty good on the descent to Raw Dog Falls, only having to backtrack a bit on the road to, as the rules dictate, climb to the point where I was in line with the falls. However, from there I just stayed on the road too long and almost went all the way out to Meth Lab Hill instead of crossing the stream and finding Danger Dave's Climbing Wall and the Barrel Book. Eventually I found it, but that meant that the group behind me (Nicki Rehn, Liz Canty) mostly passed me. The climb up Pighead Creek and the Prison Mine Trail is straightforward, and then Rat Jaw is an out and back, so I saw them all there heading down as I was heading up.
I burned another few minutes at the prison tunnel, in retrospect a very obvious place. The directions say the tunnel starts at the northeast corner, but I'd really call it the east corner. Or just "the totally totally obvious place right where you come down the powerline cut--don't try and circle the outside of the prison wall because there's a bunch of concertina wire that says you can't." I eventually figured that out, got my book, and made my way up Indian Knob. On the way up, Dewayne Satterfield, Kaz Williams (the human sacrifice), Gabriel Szerda, and Stephanie Case, caught up to me, and we all caught up to one other guy from the group ahead (you know, just some guy on US 24-hour distance team whose name I can't remember, no biggy). Dewayne was a huge help finding our way through The Eye of the Needle, and it was nice that there were other people there for the start of serious rain, serious cold, and dark. We descended and passed Gary, Guillaume, and Allie heading the opposite direction. Dewayne was also a big help finding the Beech Tree Hollow book, and then we all trudged up Big Hell, hitting the Chimney Top book dead on. The rain was coming down really heavily, but I had a waist-mounted light with me that was a lifesaver, with way less glare in fog than my headlamp, which I was also carrying. After getting on trail at Chimney Top we passed Johan and then shortly my buddy Scott, and then I bombed down the trails, dropping everyone else behind me. Passing through the campsite I screamed for Amy to bring all my stuff to the bathroom, and I finished loop one in 12:47.
Interloopally, Amy and our friend Jenny (Spike) brought all my stuff to the very nice central bathroom. (I had not read about the park bathroom, but really, it's very nice. Electricity and free hot showers.) I changed all my top layers, putting on a t-shirt, long sleeved t-shirt, a thick Patagonia fleece, and a brand new REI alpine thickness hardshell. I tied my old Montbell hardshell around my waist because why not, and a rain skirt to keep some rain off my midsection felt like a good idea at the time. I stupidly switched out of a glove system that was working fine, switched batteries, scarfed a ramen, and headed back out at around 13:07.
Many thanks to Amy and Jenny for getting me back on course so quickly and for putting up with the general grumpiness.
Loop 2
I passed a few people on the way back up to Chimney Top, but no one I recognized. Later it turned out one of them was Scott, who quit after being hypothermic on Chimney Top. If I'd realized it, I would have yelled at him, given him my extra jacket (though it's probably too small), my extra gloves, hat, and chemical hand warmers (I really had a lot of gear) and proposed to do loop two together. Instead, I climbed Chimney Top alone, and wandered around the capstones myself for several minutes until Steph and Gabriel showed up, and we talked over the navigation together and finally found the book. From then until I bailed on them after book eight, we worked as a team. We went down Big Hell a bit off track, coming down one confluence too low, so we followed the stream up to find the Beech Tree Hollow book. Only, the streams were still confusing us, and we were a bit alarmed at how powerful they were. We thought they'd risen several feet in only a couple hours, which wouldn't have been impossible, but we were just looking at the wrong creek. Eventually we righted ourselves and climbed to Indian Knob, but we had to circle the capstones for a really long time before finding the Eye of the Needle. (Is there an easy way to do this counter clockwise? Clockwise it's the second set of capstones, but counterclockwise it seems like you could hit the top basically anywhere.)After Indian Knob we descended to the prison, which was confusing because the lights in the valley are (mostly) not the prison, but they're tempting to head towards. We still hit it pretty close, and it was a very easy course correction at the bottom. We got the book there, and then, holy shit, the prison tunnel. The mild little stream was raging, and I didn't think it looked particularly safe. Freezing cold class three rapids down a concrete ramp through a tunnel under a prison in the middle of the night was more like it. But Gabriel is heavier, so he went first, and said it was alright, so we all shuffled through, making sure to squeeze through the side of the gate on the far end so we wouldn't get swept off the edge into the outflow pool. (I heard later one runner did get swept off his feet and slid the whole tunnel up to his neck in water.) We took a break and climbed Rat Jaw. The fog rolled in so thick we veered off-course on a power line cut. Again: fog so thick we had trouble following a mowed powerline cut straight up a hill. By the top I realized I had almost completely lost my voice (remember I started with a cold), and I started to think I wouldn't finish loop two. I told Gabe and Steph that I couldn't talk anymore, so I occasionally started blowing the whistle on my pack and pointing whenever I noticed anything important.
Pighead descent was easy enough, and I found the barrel book and helped us get around Dave's Climbing Wall. On the way up I told Gabe and Steph that I wasn't going to make it the whole way. I felt like I was going so slowly that they'd eventually drop me, but they really weren't any faster. They were out of sight for a minute down Testacle Spectacle, but I caught them at the book. We crossed the New River and climbed to Fyke's Peak Crater, and I decided I was done. Gabe kept saying "we have room" in the group, but I had come up with enough excuses. I had a big presentation at work. (God, how cliche is that?) Basically, I was flying out from Nashville Monday at 4pm, and I thought that if I spent all Sunday out on the trails, I wouldn't be able to do my work presentation on Tuesday. Kind of stupid, but maybe not--I expect a lot of people didn't fly out until Tuesday, and were smart enough not to schedule brand new lessons about multiple hypothesis testing for Tuesday afternoon. Also, I felt like shit, had eaten maybe 1,000 calories in the previous 24 hours, and had run out of water. I put on my hardshell jacket and pants and was still cold. So after 8 of 13 books counterclockwise, I skipped Leonard's Buttslide and walked a flat road straight to book 10. Halfway there I found some road runoff water that was running clear, so I sat down and flushed a few handfuls of Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels down the gullet. I immediately considered reversing course and finishing the loop. After multiple back and forths, I figured I'd just skip one book (Leonard's Buttslide) and get the rest. So I continued along the road and got the Garden Spot book. (This road, which connects Fyke's Peak Crater to the Garden Spot without any descent, isn't on the map, but friends did detailed Google Earth research and I learned about it from them. I wonder what I would have done if I hadn't known it was there. Maybe still quit at the Garden Spot, since the course directions clearly point out the access to Quitter's Road from there.)
After Garden Spot I was feeling good, ready to do three more climbs (one on candy-ass trail, two big off trail). I stripped off layers and started running the candy-ass trail, easily finding the coal ponds ledge I mentioned above and reconnecting to the trail. The trail contours around Bald Knob instead of hitting the summit, so as soon as the switchbacks stopped, I knew the hill to my left was Bald Knob. I went due south and hit a bench. I was a little surprised to see a campsite with picnic benches, but no matter. I was a little surprised that the summit was still another short away, but no matter. I reached the summit, and couldn't find the remnant of a capstone that Laz mentions in the directions, but no matter. The book is under a large rock ten feet from a large tree (not the most helpful description in a forest!) so I started flipping rocks. I then spent maybe an hour flipping over rocks. I got tired of flipping over rocks so I started standing them vertically on their edge so I could tell from a distance which I had already checked. But there was no book there. Despair and anger set in, and I quit (again). I headed north to reconnect to the trail, only I very quickly hit a road...and realized I'd been searching on Squire Knob instead of Blad Knob! Dammit. A glance at the map made the mistake obvious--Squire Knob is east of Bald Knob, so when you're coming counter clockwise, you're actually looking for the second knob you contour around, not the first.
I was too demoralized at this point to do serious offtrail navigation, and I slowly made my way down Quitter's Road to the yellow gate. I think I came in around 27 hours. I was upset, so I waved off some of the camera operators who were stationed at the Quitter's Road/Bird Mountain Trail junction. To my surprise, the first voice I heard cheering me to the gate was Scott Martin, since I didn't know he'd dropped shortly into loop two. Laz told me that with 8 books I was currently the lead American (Gary, Guillaume, and Allie are Canadian, French, and Scottish) but I knew that wouldn't last, since 7 more people would come in over the next several hours with all their loop two pages (all well over the time limit).
My face was numb, I ate some ramen and potato chips, started coughing a lot, and took a nap. Allie and Johan came in (in the wrong direction) from loop three. I turned in early, but most everyone else waited by the campfire for Gary and Guillaume, the two remaining runners on loop three. Gary was a few minutes over the cutoff to continue on loop four, but was credited with a fun run. Guillaume didn't come in until Monday morning--he had all his books but was lost in the fog on England Mountain for eight hours until he could find his way back to camp. So that was that. The course won. Only one fun run finisher, and no runners even started loop four. Monday morning we packed up. I gave a book I'd just finished "The Stranger in the Woods" to Laz, in hopes he uses it on the course next year. His parting words to me were "I only wish you were still out there suffering." We had breakfast at Angie's, drove to Nashville, and flew to DC. Tuesday morning I presented, with basically no voice, at the Inter-American Development Bank.
I can't wait to go back.
Gear
The weather was really bad. (Frozen Ed said it was maybe the second worst he's seen; Laz was much more cryptic.) I didn't feel very cold, however, and only remember shivering once--the air temperature was definitely lower in the cloudless days before the race than on race day. Because it was so cold, I really had to work to cram all my gear into my pack (Peter Bakwin Ulimate Direction 2.0). I regretted having such a heavy pack, and was cursing it during the race, but Scott pointed out that my gear in fact enabled me to continue when his lack of gear prevented him from doing so. So I'm glad I had my heavy REI hard shell. On loop one it mostly stayed in my pack, and I wore a lighter Sierra Designs Stormlight light shell. On loop two I wore the heavy hardshell nearly the whole time and had a second lighter Montbell hardshell tied around my waist. Two hardshells is obviously overkill. I just forgot to bring any of my regular windshirts (Marmot Ion, Patagonia Houdini) and I only bought the REI hardshell on Tuesday. Next time: one serious hardshell and a windshirt.The course was obviously very difficult, but I do think the brambles are overblown. It's just green briar! I'll take sparse eastern green briar over western blackberries and mountain whitethorn any day! Granted, on the powerline cuts, the brambles get much, much larger, but most years those are mowed. Of course, I had the benefit of running in a cold year so full-length tights were an easy choice. In a hot year, knee-high socks or compression sleeves would be a wise choice. Having just said that the brambles aren't a big deal, it does add up, such that if you want to be able to run more than one loop at top speed, you're probably going to need to protect your shins.
I can't imagine doing any part of this race without trekking poles. I typically don't like trekking poles on downhills, feeling they throw off my balance a bit (I'd always put them away for downhills at Hardrock) but I didn't put them away a single time at Barkley. They helped keep me upright on a few descents, but I probably should have put them away. I just used my cheap Cascade Mountain Tech carbon fiber poles, which are harder to stow than folding ones like Black Diamond's. (See Skurka's analysis.) Eventually I'll get a Black Diamond set and a new pack so that I can stow them on the fly.
Fingerless bike gloves seem standard for Barkley. Since I use trekking poles so infrequently I got big thumb blisters, preventable with any full glove. If it were too hot for gloves I'd just hope to remember to tape my thumb next time.
I wore a pair of La Sportiva Ultra Raptors. La Sportiva really seems like the predominant choice in events like this--they've got good grip and they're beefy enough to protect your feet off trail. Gaiters were nice to have, and I was really glad I bothered to super glue the velcro bit onto the back of my La Sportivas so the gaiters stayed in place.
Lastly, monkey butt. I chafed really bad., which I wasn't expecting in tights, but I don't run in them that often, so what do I know? I've been trying Squirrel Nut Butter for a while, having gotten a bunch of it free from races, but it doesn't work nearly as well as Body Glide.
Final Thoughts
God, I hope Laz lets me come back. This year my goal was one loop under the cutoff and a second no matter how long it took, but I failed at that. I think that after learning the course, in a better weather year, with more training I have a shot at a fun run. I'd like to try. Next time I won't get sick until after the race, when I'll make sure to have nothing in the least scheduled for work.
I had a lot of fun. Was this my favorite race? Hard to say whether I like this or Euchre Bar Massacre better. They're really quite comparable. I do like that you have some candy-ass on-trail descents at EBM such that you can fly down them a little easier, but the nasty weather at Barkley really lived up to the hype. Was it the hardest race I've ever done? Hard to say. I feel like Hardrock was harder just because I was allowed to be on the course longer than either EBM or Barkley, so it's hard to compare. Surely mile for mile Barkley is the slowest I've ever "run." So fun. So fun!
Comments
Post a Comment