The Perfect Race

Icicles keep forming on my eyelashes, making it hard to see. I take off my lobster glove to pull the ice off my face. The first mile is uphill, and I obsessively look at my watch, out of breath as my body warms up. I had done my two-mile warm-up, but it still always takes me 15 or 20 minutes to settle. I try not to worry too much that my chest is heaving half a mile into a 16-mile race. Before starting, I set my watch to show only the data I care about: elapsed miles and average pace per mile.

I have sternly told myself that my only real goal today is to stick to the plan: get through the first 10 miles at an average of 8:30 per mile, or 85 minutes. Over the last couple of years, I have run half-marathons, 20-milers, marathons, and ultra-marathons. I have found it impossible to crack the code. I get a few miles into the race, I feel great, and throw my plan out the window. It’s a sort of over-excited-monkey-mind where I ignore the laws of gravity. This pattern is suicide, denial, and some deep form of self-abuse. Even though the start of a race might feel unexpectedly easy, particularly if it’s a big race and I have a lot of adrenaline, none of that changes my underlying fitness. I will pay for the blunder. In my case, as a 61-year-old with a fragile body, I will pay dearly.

At the New York City half-marathon, I literally set my fastest ever 10k time off the starting line. Meaning I ran 6.2 miles faster than I ever have in my life. The only problem was I still had 6.9 miles to go (and don’t be fooled, the streets of New York City are really fucking hilly when you are trying to run them). At the Black Canyon 100k ultra two years ago, we had a snowstorm at the start, which melted into peanut butter mud six inches deep on the first part of the course. My instinct was to sprint through that mess. But the mud lasted for eight miles. When we finally got into the dry, runnable canyon, I took off, relieved to be free at last. I ran an amazing 31 miles. The next 31 miles were the darkest of my life (and not just because I ran through the night). I was the last finisher in just over 20 hours, deeper in the pain cave than I have ever been in my life. When I finally finished and called my son to tell him about my rearranged travel plans, I was crying so hard I couldn’t speak.

The worst part of this terrible habit is the toll it takes on my body. More than once, I had to excuse myself from a post-race meal to find some bushes to puke into. For 24 hours afterwards, my body shuts down, I have a fever and body aches so bad I am reduced to taking massive amounts of Advil and huddle in the fetal position in bed until it finally breaks. After the NYC half, I was on a train, trying to get to Providence to take my son out to dinner, and I literally did not believe I would make it. My body was shutting down, and I was shaking so terribly.

This whole scenario is emblematic of deeper patterns in my life where I am overtaken by a sort of mania that sends me blindly down avenues that end in disaster. I have some deep unconscious knowing that whatever I am energetically, obsessively, pursuing might not end well (again), but I just can’t help myself. I have worked very hard to unwind all of this to reveal why I self-sabotage, why I don’t believe I am worthy of success. Why anxiety and some form of self-hate cause this protective super energy surge to sprint through the mud in a 20-hour race, rather than rationally slow down and take my time, saving my energy for later when I will really need it?

Back in New Hampshire, the biggest blizzard in a decade is brewing. The first mile is a little slower than my goal pace, but the next two are downhill. In running in general, and ultra-running in particular, you learn to move with the terrain, especially as a bigger human (I am 6’2” and 200 pounds, not the ideal body type for running). That means trying not to jack your heart rate on the uphill, running easy on the flat, and taking full advantage of downhills, by taking the brakes off, leaning forward, and just letting go like water flowing down a river bed, capturing speed with almost no effort.

I let my legs go quickly and easily over the next two downhill miles, burning no energy but capturing some speed. As a result, at 3 miles, I am well under my goal pace, averaging 8:12. This concerns me a little, but I try to tell myself to chill out. We are so early it’s impossible to tell what is really going on. Focus on clearing the ice from your eyes and breathing. Thankfully, my heart has calmed down, and I have settled into a nice, leisurely feeling pace. My legs are going on muscle memory, turning over unconsciously without my even trying. I look down sheepishly at my bright orange Brooks Hyperion Elite 5 super shoes. What older man runs in these things? At least they won’t lose me in the storm.

This is the third year in a row I have run this race. Two years ago, I finished in 2:27, and last year I finished in 2:23. It’s a brutal course with a series of massive, sharp climbs from mile 9 through 12. The first year, I had to walk them. Last year, I ran them, but at a crawl. Coming in mid-January in Derry, New Hampshire, it always seems to be bitterly cold. But this year is next level. It had been 2 degrees at the start, with the historic snowfall on the way. Race organizers offer a “sunshine” start at 9 am rather than the regular 10 am, generally for people who expect to need extra time on the course. This time, the officials suggest everyone start early to avoid the snow, which is forecast to begin at 1 pm. I took them up on that offer, as did most everyone else. But as I run the 4th mile, I begin to see ominous flecks of granular-looking snow in the air. Thankfully, my head and face have warmed up enough that my eyelashes are no longer crystallizing into sweat icicles. But no signs of monkey mind, just focus on the job at hand: stick to the plan.

One thing that always surprises me is how much quicker miles tick off in a race than in training, especially early. I am almost surprised by mile 5. I am wearing a vest to hold two 500-milliliter soft water bottles containing my own special brew of hydration and fuel. The most significant advances in endurance sports over the past ten years have come from a much greater understanding of the importance of fueling and the human body’s capacity to ingest massive amounts of calories, thereby significantly increasing performance. Ultra-runners and Tour de France riders now consume 400-500 calories per hour, double what they had before the new wave of science.

A couple of years ago, I worked with an intern at Dartmouth Tuck Business School and fellow Wesleyan grad, Mikey Yablong, to conduct an exhaustive market study of the trail running industry, part of which focused on the fueling options. Skratch Labs came out on top. When we published the article, the co-founder and CEO, Ian MacGregor, contacted me to thank me and sent me a big box of his product. I subsequently interviewed him for my class, and we have become close friends. Ian has been personally fine-tuning my fueling before this race, so my bottles are filled with the exact concentration of his high-calorie and hydration products. It tastes amazing because, unlike all the other products on the market, including these crazy plastic-tasting hydrogels, Skratch is 100% natural, free of all the crap that rots your stomach. Stomach issues take down way more endurance athletes than lack of fitness.

I plan to drink from one of my bottles at 5 miles and the other at 10 miles. The only problem is that, as I cross 5 miles and take the bottle out, I realize the top is frozen solid. I suck on it, and nothing comes out. I take off my gloves, remove the top, and try to drink from the bottle through the wide opening. I spill a good amount down my front, but most of it gets in my mouth and tastes great, a sure sign I need the fuel and the hydration at this point. But the whole operation takes effort, and all that fluid in my mouth while I am running hard forces me to hold my breath. I am completely out of breath when I am done and have to settle my heart rate back down. It has cost me something, but the fuel is worth it. Once I have everything put away, I glance at my watch and see I am still at 8:23 per mile, a bit fast but very close to on track.

In all these efforts, I use an internal suffer score to gauge how I am doing. Looking at myself from the outside helps me manage when things get tough. And tracking my score allows me think through my next steps in real time. As I approach the 6-mile market, I put myself at a comfortable 5 on a 1-10 scale. I remind myself that for most of the back half of the Black Canyon race (the part that took over 10 hours), I was pinned at 9.8 or 9.9. Even at that extreme level of suffering, there is still variation. A slight downhill, a less technical stretch of trail, and encouragement from a fellow runner will briefly ease the suffering, giving me some modest relief. That’s the only way it’s possible to get through.

I have also created a playlist for this race, as I do every race, which I listen to under my wool hat and the hood of my bright blue waterproof running jacket, using Shokz earphones that send sound through the bones of my head. I ease into a flow state. My senses become heightened, and my mind empties of thought. Even though I am moving, I experience stillness. Time stops having any meaning. I am in a psychedelic dream. The green of the trees, the feeling of the road under my feet, and even the few words of encouragement from the runners I pass feel bigger and more vivid than usual. And as Dermont Kennedy, Mumford & Sons, and the Rolling Stones come on, I find myself saying out loud as I recognize the next song, “YES!” like I had never heard the song, even though I have probably listened to it thousands of times.

Then I hit the English Beat song “Save It for Later” and am caught short. The Beat was my favorite band in college, forty years ago. The day before the race, I got word that the very heart of our college rowing team, our coxswain, Karen Humphries, had lost her battle with cancer. All the memories of her, our team, and my friendship with Karen in the decades after graduating come rushing back to me. I start to get emotional and try to set it aside for now, since I have a job to do. But I can feel her watching me.

Often in my races, especially the long ones, I find myself accompanied by my kids, my friends, even my spirit animals. My late Bernese Mountain Dog Zeus, a 130-pound Buddha of a beast, comes to me frequently, his massive, soulful eyes expressing unconditional love directly into my heart, easing my suffering and inspiring me to keep going when it feels like there is no way I can.

At 8 miles, the snow starts to get serious. Apparently, the weather forecast was wrong. It starts to accumulate on the road, swirling around in the cold, and then piling up. I try to pick my way through the few bare patches of pavement and then give up, just trying to find the least sticky part of the road. I balance this with my effort to run the tangents. As the course twists and turns, I don’t want to run any extra steps, so I am constantly looking ahead to see which way the road is going. I run the straight line, which is the shortest path around each turn, irrespective of the increasingly sloppy footing, while trying not to get run over by the occasional car.

And then I am at 9 miles. The course takes a sharp left-hand turn up what looks like a cliff. I remember this part and tell myself to calm down—these are the steepest 100 yards on the whole course. A race official is at the corner pointing up the hill. “And the fun begins!” I shout to him with a certain amount of glee.

I tell myself to save the matches. Keep my heart rate low. Quick feet, short strides, keep moving, but do not push. Pull back. Patience. “Gentle,” I say out loud, channeling my inner coach. Jacking my heart rate is a huge mistake here. This is all about staying smooth and calm.

In the build-up to the race, my dog Kodi’s favorite workout is a 1k uphill repeat session we do on a private road near our house. It has a flat stretch, then a long, very steep uphill, flat, then another uphill, more flat, and finishes straight up hill. Every two weeks, we do 5 of these; the last time, we did 6. Kodi knows the drill. I take him off-leash at the bottom. And on each rep, he waits for my instruction. At “go!” he takes off up the hill. He has time to explore the swamp at the bottom, mostly frozen now, and parts of the yards along the way. He feels free to stop to relieve himself, always coming up from behind me like a freight train.

The last time we did the workout on Meadowbrook Lane, Kodi went over the bank beside the road as we came down our next-to-last time, apparently finding a fallen tree or some other object of interest. He has a mental safety bubble around me, and if he senses that he has fallen out of it, he gets scared, stops whatever he is doing, and sprints to find me. In this case, he rejoined me well before I got back down to the starting line. I try to negative split the workout so think of the successive efforts as 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% and the last one, which this now was, at 100%, meaning push all the chips into the center of the table, go all in, commit to full throttle all the way. I focus on accelerating as I crest each climb, speeding up on the flat when my heart is beating out of my chest and my instinct is to slow down. From years of meditation, I have learned to count my breaths to manage the most extreme suffering.

On our last 1k uphill sprint, Kodi took off as usual, but as we approached the first climb, he disappeared over that bank again. I noted it, but didn’t really care, as I had to focus to finish the workout. I have set the road a segment on Strava. When I get home, I will review the data: did I negative split, increase my effort as expressed by heart rate on each one, and was the final climb was faster than prior identical workouts? This is all preparation for the racing.

I got to the top, bent over, trying to get my breathing and heart under control, relieved to be done, but concerned that Kodi hadn’t shown up. As I jogged back down the road, I started swearing, imagining having to drive around the neighborhood to look for my dog after such a brutal workout, the last thing I wanted to do. I passed the spot where he disappeared, and no Kodi. Then I saw a woman walking up the road and asked her if she had seen a Golden. “Yup,” she said. “He is waiting for you at the bottom of the road,” as she pointed her thumb over her shoulder.

Sure enough, when I got to the spot where Meadowbrook meets Westfield Street, Kodi was sitting perfectly still a foot away from where I had dropped his leash an hour and a half before. He clearly had come back over the bank into the road when he sensed I was too far away, but I had continued up the hill and around a turn out of sight. He must have been confused which way I had gone and guessed wrong. Not seeing me, he went to the spot he knew I would eventually turn up and waited patiently for me to come back.

As I get to the top of the first steep part after the mile 9 marker, take a turn, and see a much longer, more gradual climb directly ahead, I think about Meadowbrook Lane, how my suffer score increases until it is pinned, and I feel a sort of out-of-body experience watching myself hurt at the end of the workout. This feels nothing like that. My discomfort eases up to maybe 5.5 or 6. But nothing more. I feel totally comfortable—no big deal.

At 10 miles, I look down and see my elapsed pace at 8:33. I am at first a little annoyed to be slightly over. I have clearly slowed a bit on the massive climb. But then I remind myself that the goal was not to go out too fast. I am still in great shape. I have achieved the only real thing I wanted to accomplish today, as I am headed back to Black Canyon in three weeks to attempt the 62-mile ultra in the Arizona desert, complete with three river crossings, in hopes of doing a better job than last time. This is just a test run to see if I can stick to my plan.

I get the second bottle out of my vest, loath to take my gloves off in the cold. The high concentration of Ian’s Skratch Lab ingredients, including sodium and electrolytes, should make it harder to freeze. But as I get the top off, I realize the fluid in the bottle is slushy, verging on solid. It takes some work to get any of this viscous substance into my mouth. And the effort of doing so causes me to drop a glove. I have no choice but to backtrack and waste precious time picking it up. My hand will freeze off without it. “Fuck!” I say under my breath before getting back into rhythm. I look at my watch again to make sure my overall pace hasn’t been disrupted by the detour.

Now I need to figure out my strategy for the rest of the race. The snow is heavy, and the footing is slick. It is still brutally cold, but I feel fine, my choice of clothing just right. I have run this race enough times that the course is coming back to me, my situational memory kicking in. I know the next two miles are really the story of the whole thing—two more giant climbs. The last four miles to the finish are flat with some nice downhill sections. The very last mile has a long downhill before a short, final uphill to the finish.

I decide to stay relaxed and calm through the remaining two miles of climbing and then treat the last four miles like my workouts, gradually jacking up the intensity: 60% on the climbs; 70% on mile 13; 80% mile 14; 90% on mile 15; and empty the fucking tank the last mile at 100%.

I continue to feel very comfortable up the hills that in prior years had crushed my soul. I flash back to walking up this same stretch two years ago. The pitches come one after another, often looking like maybe I am through the worst of it, only to turn a corner and see another massive climb. I warn myself each time my mind thinks I am done that there is more to go, but not to panic. I am still feeling good. Maybe 6 or 6.5 now, breathing easy, and I can feel my heart rate is still very much under control. I think about what Dez Linden, the famed winner of the Boston Marathon, whose podcast with Kara Goucher I love, says about what she tells herself during races: “Relax, relax, relax,” since relaxed running is fast running.

I decide to stop looking at my watch. The first 10 miles, it was an important tool. Now I am running purely on feel. Getting up these hills using as little effort as I can while maintaining speed, and then begin to squeeze until there is nothing left.

As I come over the last hill, hit a flat and then a slight down, I feel my turnover accelerate. My feet and legs are operating without my brain. They just take off. I am feeling some mild soreness in my hip flexors and my lower back, but nothing alarming. I feel strong, even with the snow now hard in my face, my feet slipping around, and I begin to focus myself for the final push.

Karen comes back to me then. Tears freeze on my face. This race is going exactly as I planned. It is so fucking beautiful. I feel so alive. It’s in these moments that I am most connected to my God, to the world, to everything. I am no longer separated. I am no longer alone or lonely. I have nothing to prove. This is unconditional love. Mother Earth, amid this epic weather on this beautiful stretch of road in rural New Hampshire on a winter day, holds me in a loving embrace. There is no gravity. I am flying.

Karen was the toughest 100-pound woman I have ever met, tougher than any of the hulking men she ordered around or raced against. I’m a 61-year-old guy, a recovering alcoholic who should have died a dozen times over, and yet I get to be here in this moment running free, flying in fact, on this stretch of gorgeous road. And Karen is gone.

It breaks my heart. And yet I feel her with me, urging me on, to take it all in, the beauty, the power in my body, the feeling of flying, and most of all the unconditional love from her, from Zeus, from my students, from my friends and family, and from the whole earth.

I remember the long, straightaway into the 16th mile that feels like it goes on forever. It’s the first time I find myself looking for that mile marker and wondering where the hell it is. My legs are churning in the snow. Fast feet. And finally, there it is. Just two miles to go. Maybe 16 minutes. I can do anything for 16 minutes. I break my promise and look at my watch—8:37 average. The hills slowed me down. But not that much, really. I start mentally calculating whether I can go fast enough to get to 8:30 for the whole race. Then put that thought out of my mind.

My legs are moving even faster now, and my heart rate still feels controlled, my breathing easy. As I click through a series of turns with cones on a busy street that I remember from the last two years as slightly treacherous, the thought comes to me that I feel like a runner, a good runner. Even though I ran a speedy marathon as a kid, it has been a long time since I thought of myself that way. I finished third in my age group in a big half-marathon in December, and the race gave me free entry the following year as a prize. I jokingly told my kids this was a sure sign I should go pro and look for NIL money, but I didn’t really believe I was any good.

The 17th mile marker surprises me. I remember this part now. Right-hand turn, steep downhill, then flat to the main road, and up the hill to the finish. There’s a race official on the downhill warning of ice. And it is dangerously slippery. I just let my legs speed up as the only way to make sure I don’t fall. I still almost do face plant. There had been two runners in the distance ahead of me for the last couple of miles, not seeming to get much closer. Now they are right there, perhaps being more cautious on the downhill. I pass one of them, joking that we all need to try not to kill ourselves here. And then I am off to catch the second one.

Out on the main road, now the uphill is shorter than I remembered. I pull next to the guy in front of me. “Come on, brother, we can do this. Come with me!” We take the last turn into the school parking lot together. I see the finishing tunnel a hundred yards ahead and sprint. Then I am done. Bent over. Hit my watch to record my time.

After a minute or two, I wander over to the fire truck parked on the other side of the lot to ask them to help me unlock my car. I had managed to lock my keys in the trunk of my car with Kodi inside. The extreme cold somehow disabled the remote-control key.

After the firemen successfully reunite me with Kodi, I sit in my car while he licks my face to warm up and check my stats: final time is two hours and sixteen minutes, a whopping 7-minute personal record on the course. My last mile was 7:15, the fastest of the whole day, bringing my average pace for the entire race to exactly 8:30 per mile.

No sign of chills, shaking or flu-like hell in the aftermath of the effort. I feel amazing, actually, as I realize I have just had the perfect race.

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This post was previously published on Linkedin.com.