This was initially going to be a post recapping the 18-mile
Wapack Trail race I ran at the beginning of September. It was a race so
different from what I've been used to doing these last few years (mostly road),
and my foray into the trail-racing community has been such a positive
experience that deserves a second look. But since the training for this race
reshaped most of my summer running regimen, it only makes sense to tie in some
of the bigger picture ideas from earlier this year and where I'm headed now as
we inch closer to 2018. I'm hoping this will be a good read for those who are
out there grinding every day, trying to stay motivated, and maybe looking for
some inspiration to keep pushing. There's more in here than I thought there
would be at first, so maybe it will make for a good weekend read.
Over the last 4 or 5 years, I've gotten used to training for
one or two big races in both the spring and the fall seasons. Everything in
between was a little less serious and mushy. A marathon would usually be
followed by a small break from my structured training, a reverse taper period,
some fun smaller races, and usually an annoying injury or two. But before I
knew it, it would be time to start getting serious with another marathon
training cycle. Mid-June would mean it's time to start training for a
mid-October marathon. January 1st was a great time to start ramping
up the mileage for Boston in April, or any other big Spring race. Something
felt different this summer though, and I knew it was a good time to shake
things up a bit.
Mid-June hit this year and I was still running well after the
Boston marathon, maintaining a good base mileage while remaining healthy. I was
enjoying an amorphous state of early summer running, and for the first time in
a while I didn't have a marathon picked out four months in advance that would
have shaped my training for the next 16 weeks. I was structurally unstructured,
so I took advantage of it by hitting some trails and exploring new terrain all
over New England. A friend of mine, Andrew, had mentioned a personal goal of
his over the summer to run the entire Taconic Crest trail (36+ miles) in a
single effort. That sounded pretty cool, so I offered to join him on a portion
of the trail if he wanted company during his 7 hour or so journey. Not much
came of this until a few days before it actually happened, and almost on a whim
another friend of mine and I were up at 5am on a Saturday morning in July to
drive to New York to find the trail head where we thought he would be.
We found the road that turned to dirt and eventually split
off into the trail, and Andrew came running through shortly after we found a
halfway legitimate spot to park at. Within two minutes, we were fully immersed
in the woods, passing through rocky, rooty, at some points overgrown, and very,
very hilly terrain. Andrew was already about 24 miles into his run, and we
would tag along for the last 12 miles of his journey to the end of the trail.
Some hills were too steep and too big to run up, and tagging along with someone
coming up on 30 miles into a trail run only reinforced the idea that my overall
pace wasn't important, and it became secondary to the goal of just getting to
the finish. Of course this was much different from my road running where every
mile split seemed to have mattered more, and I would rarely break pace for an
extended period of time. Whether it's on the road or the track, I always try to
put in a solid effort, and am constantly comparing my latest efforts to
previous ones.
A total dichotomy arises, however, with trail running. It's
hard to compare efforts from one trail run to the next due to the ever-changing
terrain and variety of choices to make within a much wider network of paths.
That's exactly what makes it all the more exciting. A break from the roads is
all it takes to reinvigorate one's training. You're forced to slow down and not
worry so much about pace, and instead focus on the ground beneath you and the
environment surrounding you, all while still putting in a good effort. The
sensory overload from blazing through forests is overwhelming – in a good way.
It's this intense connectedness to nature that sometimes puts everything else
into perspective. You’re always left wanting more. Over the years, maybe about
5 percent of all of my running has been done on trails, and I've enjoyed every
second of those runs. Hitting the Taconic Crest trail for a few hours that
Saturday in July was enough to convince me to re-center my training around
trails for the rest of the summer – all I had to do once I got back home was
select a race.
Thankfully, the greater Boston metropolitan area is loaded
with all kinds of running competition. An hour's drive – and usually less –
will find you at a road race of any distance, a marathon, an ultramarathon,
mountain races, beach routes, a local 5k weekly series, an intensely fun cross
country scene, high-profile track meets, and of course – trail races of all
kinds. So after years of almost strictly gutting it out on the pavement,
wouldn't it make sense to take advantage of the variety that New England has to
offer? I definitely thought so. There was a trail race I had only heard of by
name of which its reputation I wasn't yet fully aware. The Wapack Trail race
seemed to fall in the right place at the right time, and with it being an early
September race, I'd have a month and a half to fine-tune my training for it.
I start by going onto the Wapack Trail race website to read
up on the race and gather any information I could on it. There are warnings
everywhere. Taken directly from the website itself, the first warning (of quite
a few) exclaims: “This is a very tough trail race.
Please don’t attempt it unless you are in excellent shape. Because much of the
trail is inaccessible by vehicles, medical aid could take a very long time.” Perfect, I thought, this sounds like a race for me. Even
though I was running 40 miles/week, I knew that this base didn't quite
constitute me as being in the kind of “excellent shape” that this race required
of its entrants. Road miles alone wouldn't cut it – so from here it was time to
get creative and have a little fun with my training. It was time to hit the
trails, grind up a lot of hills, and craft workouts that would make me wonder
what I had really gotten myself into.
One great thing about having good
base mileage is that it allows you to deviate from your training if you want
to. For me, I traded two easy days for one tough hill workout and some recovery
miles the next day. Medium effort days tended to be replaced by similar
distance runs in which I tried to incorporate more trails and tougher terrain
done at a slightly slower pace. It was important to pay more attention to how
everything felt while climbing and twisting through trails rather than slaving
over hitting a certain mile split. Finally, my long runs took on a whole new
shape in the form of either a) as much climbing and descending as I could
handle in 12 miles or b) a 14 mile “depletion run” that served more as a
physiological endurance test rather than a psychological toughness challenge.
I'll try to explain these the best I can.
My 12 mile hill run was supposed to
be a 15 mile run going up and down Wachusett mountain 3 times. Plain and
simple. Each round trip is 5 miles with 1,000 vertical feet of elevation. The
Wapack Trail race website was a little vague with its description of its
overall elevation gain, with an estimate of between 3,000 to 4,000 total vertical
feet. I wanted to approach that amount of elevation at least once in training.
The weather wasn't in my favor for this workout that morning, but I was intent
on getting it done. Halfway up my first summit a light drizzle turned into a
steady rain, and before I headed back up for my second summit it was pouring
buckets. So I came back down and found a couple smaller, more manageable hills
to finish off the workout soaking wet with about 2,500 feet of elevation gain
in the bag. I didn't know at the time how fitting – and probably helpful – the
rain that morning would be, as race day provided us with another rainstorm of
biblical proportions.
A few weeks later was my 14 mile
depletion run, which was a whole different workout in and of itself. (This type
of run isn't for everyone, and if attempting one, I think it's safe to suggest
doing loops close to home or with water caches set aside along your route.)
While what I did wasn't quite to the extent that some ultramarathoners practice
during their training, I believe it still helped prepare me for an 18 mile
super hilly trail race. There's a bit more science behind this type of run, and
its effects have been researched on us humans along with animals that rely on
endurance for survival. Simply put, you are depleting yourself of glycogen
(what carbohydrates are stored as in your muscles and liver) in the days
leading up to a specific run. I mainly switched to a higher fat and protein
diet for a few days before the run while forgoing food with a higher concentration
of carbs, and eating very little the night before with no breakfast the morning
of.
This teaches your body how to run
by burning fat as fuel (rather than glycogen) while already in a fatigued
state, which is usually what happens late in a marathon when we start fading.
Come race day, a surplus of glycogen (from carbo-loading) then becomes an even
greater advantage, as your body will learn to store it more efficiently by
using fat for fuel instead during aerobic efforts, allowing you to run longer at
a sustained pace.
When we run faster, at a
near-anaerobic pace, our body dips into our glycogen stores and uses it for
fuel. As oxygen in our muscle cells becomes scarce or absent, glycogen fills in
to provide energy for these cells when needed. We can store enough glycogen in
our body to get us through burning about 2,000 calories of fuel which
translates roughly to about 20 miles of running. And many marathoners know what
can happen at around 20 miles – the wall. When our glycogen stores run
out, our body starts burning more fat, our muscles break down, and fatigue
becomes overwhelming. To be able to train your body to reserve fuel for the
late stages of an endurance race is what the depletion run aims to do. This
type of run gets us used to the fatigue and builds endurance from it. It trains
our body to run while initially burning fat more slowly, so that we have those
glycogen reserves handy for when it really matters. Offsetting our glycogen
metabolism by 30-40 minutes can be the difference between bonking hard at mile
21 vs. finishing the last 5 miles strong and steady.
Running 8 miles a day during
marathon training is great, but it doesn't prepare you for what happens at
miles 21-26. The glycogen depletion acts as a shortcut to get to that fatigued,
fat-burning state to train in without having to run a full 20 miles first to do
so. Again, it's not for everyone, and many training programs don't require it,
but this was already quite an experimental training cycle for me so I decided
to roll with it. While I wouldn't be running 26.2 miles, I'd still be putting
in the same effort with the amount of elevation to cover in 18 miles, not to
mention constantly adjusting my stride each step of the way to avoid rocks and
roots. With a 14 mile depletion run and a 12 mile mountain run in the books,
along with many more miles of training on trails, I started feeling confident
as race day approached.
September 3rd came fast,
and I was ready to go. I woke up early to a cloudy morning and wondered at what
point during my hour ride to New Ipswich, NH, it would start pouring. The
remnants of Hurricane Harvey had made it all the way up to New England, and we
were due for some rain at any hour. I arrived early so I could mingle with some
of the volunteers and other runners to see what they thought of the course. I
knew one other person running the race, Paul, and he gave me some tips and
confidence heading in. He was heading to Montana in a few weeks to race a
100-mile ultramarathon, so this was “just a training run” for him. I’d be happy
if I could stick with him for most of the race. We met and talked with other
runners before the start, and I observed a small but friendly community of
trail junkies and endurance enthusiasts. The race director also mixed in with
us and eventually gave out a few warnings and well-wishes, and soon we gathered
behind a line made in the dirt by a volunteer dragging his heel across the
ground.
Just over 70 of us took our first
steps past the starting line, and the race was on. A group of a dozen or so
guys blasted forward through the first downhill mile on a wide logging trail,
which was conducive to a fast first mile split. I held back early, as I didn't
want to start a mountain-ridge trail race off in an anaerobic state. I'd be out
there for the same amount of time as I would've been for a marathon, so the
main goal early was to rely on a good balance of aerobic fat-burning efforts in
between the harder uphill pushes and downhill sprints that would surely
metabolize glycogen at a faster rate.
Less than a mile in came the first
major climb of 500 vertical feet to the peak of Barrett Mountain. Halfway up I
would already catch some of the guys who sprinted out of the gates. I felt
great running up the hills, but most people I passed would easily return the
favor on the downs. Their ability to fly down steep hills littered with rocks
left me in awe, as my inexperience on running these type of trails was put on
display early. To make things even more challenging, a steady rain persisted
upon us, beginning not even 10 minutes into the race. Rocks became even more
slippery than they already were, and everything on the ground that wasn't solid
soon turned into a long, mushy trail of mud.
The rain turned into a downpour and
things went from schmaltzy to deluged in the matter of minutes. Flatter parts
of the trail – which there wasn't much of, really – turned into streams, and
the steep downhills became power-walkable at best (for me, at least). I took a
tumble coming fast out of a downhill turn a few miles in and banged my elbow on
a rock, but I jumped back up and used the adrenaline to keep on running. My
elbow stung pretty good so I wiped it with my hand, and soon there was blood
all over my arm. I quickly stopped to wash off the wound (at least now there
were plenty of puddles to do so with) and hopped right back on the trail. From
what I've learned, it's pretty customary – a rite of passage even – to endure a
pretty good wound in one of these races. Quite a few others shared their
stories of cuts and bruises afterward, so I was in good company.
We weren't even halfway to the
first checkpoint yet. Following the Wapack Trail course south, we endured a
succession of dips and climbs along a ridge that consisted of three more peaks
– New Ipswich, Stony Top, and Pratt Mountain. I could tell the views would have
been much better had it not been for the tempestuous conditions. It was up to
us to navigate the rocky granite tops of each peak, where the trail became much
less defined and harder to follow while running through. We were left to do the
best we could to follow the correct path – and thankfully I was able to keep at
least one other runner in sight ahead of me for most of these parts. We came
down from the ridge and re-submerged ourselves into the wet, muddy woodlands
below. By the time I got to that first aid station 5.5 miles in, I was just
happy to feel like I had actually gotten somewhere. I had already started to
mentally fade, mostly because of the relentless rain, but I knew I was ready
for more.
The race at this point had spread
out pretty well and I was mostly out there by myself for the next couple miles.
After finally being able to gain some decent footing and good leg turnover on a
soggy but much more navigable logging trail, another 500 foot climb loomed
ahead to the top of Mount Watatic. Whenever I was finally able to maintain a
comfortable pace, the Wapack Trail was eagerly waiting with another climb to
shake things up. I had already learned that my weakness was just trying to keep
steady on the steeper downward slopes in which the dozen or so runners ahead of
me seemed to effortlessly cruise down, so I used the uphill climbs to my
advantage instead. I was stronger going up and found myself closing gaps with
others on many of the sustained climbs. I had passed one runner by the time I
reached the Watatic summit, but had to slow down a bit to navigate its rocky
top that led to the next section of trail.
Somewhere near the top of Watatic I
heard footsteps behind me and assumed it was the runner I passed during the
last climb, but instead I heard a familiar voice. Paul had caught up to me and
offered a few words of encouragement, then motored on past me down the long,
steep downhill toward the Wapack Trail’s southern terminus, making the rocky descent
look much easier than it actually was. An aid station here in Ashburnham, MA
served as the turnaround point for this out-and-back course, and at 9 miles in
it marked the halfway point. I unceremoniously grabbed a few peanuts, downed a
Powergel, drank some Gatorade, and wiped my still-bloody elbow off with a paper
towel. At this point I had nothing else to do but turn around and double my
efforts back to the finish 9 miles ahead in New Ipswich, NH.
Each twist, turn, and hill
encountered during the first 9 miles would get a second look on the way back.
This means that directly after the turnaround, we climbed back up Mount
Watatic, then back down, then back up and across the multi-peak ridge from
miles 13-17. Thankfully the rain had lightened up, but the trail remained wet,
muddy, and filled with slick rocks. After so many climbs and decents, the last
big 500 foot summit up Pratt Mountain at mile 13.5 seemed like a worthy
equivalent to what I would otherwise call “the wall” in any marathon I've ran.
I became exhausted halfway up as my running turned into a spiteful jog and
eventually into the best version of a speed-walk I could muster up as I
ascended the steep, stony incline.
Finally up at the top again, I had
to put my mind back to work and pay attention to where the trail ambiguously
continued through the rocky peak. With only a few minor detours and backtracks,
I found myself running at will for only short bursts at a time before I had to
continue exercising caution on these technical couple miles of the course. The
last big decline coming down New Ipswich Mountain at mile 16.5 served as a
final major obstacle as it, like most of the downhills on this course, was
unlike any downhill you would find on the roads. I had to work equally as hard
descending as I did ascending, preventing myself from leaning too far forward
with each step. Falling face first into a pile of mud (or rocks... did I
mention the rocks?) was the last thing I wanted to do at this point.
A half mile later and 500 feet
lower, the trail merged back onto the logging road that we ran down at the very
start of the race. I could finally regain my stride after what seemed like a
never ending series of climbs and decents. As tired as I was, I was actually
happy that the last half mile was uphill (at a much more manageable slope). I
was still running well for one last good push up the hill, and felt strong
enough to kick it in to the finish. I was so glad to see a volunteer in a
bright neon green raincoat as I approached the final turn. I crossed the finish
line in a time of 3:15:26, good for 14th place overall.
Nothing felt better than putting on
warm, dry clothes, eating some pizza, and decompressing by a toasty fire. The
race was over, but the camaraderie between us runners became even more palpable
than it was before we started. This was a race unlike anything I've ever tried,
and training for it really seemed to reinvigorate my passion for running. If I
had this much fun on a day when Mother Nature forcibly invited herself to the
party, I'd love to see what I can do when New England deals us a nice day. I'll
be back.
It was hard to believe that with
this race now in the books, a full slate of fall running events now awaited. It
was time to hit the streets and resume training with a new appreciation for
what New England has to offer in terms of variety for us runners. A 5k in
downtown Providence would have us surrounded by buildings in a hardscaped
backdrop, while a 10k in Gloucester staged on a rolling ocean-side route had us
admiring picturesque beachfront estates.
It's treats like these that keep us
coming back for more. But every now and then you have to try that new dish, at
that new restaurant, in an even more exotic locale. Each place we run in
broadens our palette. I certainly had my fill this summer and can't wait for
what the fall and winter months serve up. Some people hit the cross country
circuit, some jump on bikes or in the water. And some return to the roads.
Whatever it is, find a way to keep
it fresh. Enjoy yourself – I know I have.
