Zumbro 50: DNF

It’s 6:30AM. 

That means I’ve been running for 6 1/2 hours, give or take ten minutes. Right now, though, the term “running” has to be used loosely. I am moving along a ridge, at the edge of a field. The wind, which is blowing at 30 mph, has blown the snow into cornices across the trail, erasing the footprints of the runners ahead of me, and making the whole scene look more like Colorado in February than Minnesota in mid-April. 

At the bottom of the climb to this ridge, I had just missed being hit by a falling tree branch. 

Once I hit the ridge proper, I stepped over a downed tree that I would swear was not there the previous lap. 

I started to wonder if it was really a good idea to be out here, in southern Minnesota’s Driftless Region, running a 50 mile race in a winter storm. 

And then my left eye started to get blurry. 

So how, exactly, did I end up here?

The Build Up: A “Training Race”

I signed up for the Zumbro 50 as my first 50 miler back in January. I had run the accompanying 17 mile (1-lap) race three years ago, and remembered it as a tough, but not overly technical, course with good aid stations. 

I also remembered it being sunny and 60. 

My goals for Zumbro were primarily related to a larger goal of mine: to run the Border Route Trail in a day later this year. I thought I would use Zumbro as a test event, to dial in several items that I needed to sort out prior to attempting a 65 mile wilderness route. These goals were: 

1. Test fueling options and quantities for a longer effort. 
2. Test out at least some gear options. 
3. Test whether I can go long periods without aid. 
4. Test whether I can make sound, clear headed decisions when I am mentally and physically fatigued. 

Zumbro is an ideal course for all of these tests. At 50 miles, 1 is a necessity.  50 miles also gives ample opportunity to test out gear options. The 17 mile loop course would give me ample time to test out 3, while giving me an out, in the form of aid stations every 3-4 miles, if anything were to go south. The midnight start would force me into a state of mental fatigue. And I figured the physical fatigue was a given. 

My training in the first three months of 2018 had been very, very solid. I followed Jason Koop’s advice from “Training Essentials for Ultramarathons,” creating my own training plan from his guidelines. I had added more intensity earlier in my training than I have in the past, while at the same time slowing significantly (to about 5% per week) the rate at which I increased my weekly mileage. 

With that training under my belt, even though I had not done particularly long runs (nothing over 3 hours) in training, I felt confident heading into race week.

Pre Race: The Weather Dominates

In the weeks and days leading up to the race, the primary question, the shadow looming over the race, was the weather forecast. As race day approached, the warnings got worse: inches of rain on Friday, turning to snow sometime around the midnight start, accompanied by gale force winds and temperatures between 30 and 40 degrees. Eight or more inches of snow were forecast throughout the day Saturday.

Nevertheless, the race was still on. And so. on Friday, April 13, I drove an hour and a half southeast of the Twin Cities, to the tiny town of Theilman, MN, and reached the campground at the starting line around 2PM. The weather so far seemed surprisingly tame: 40 degrees and cloudy, with the occasional extreme wind gust. But the campground was sheltered, and the reports coming in from the 100 mile runners warned of wind, water, and mud.

I puttered around my campsite for a couple hours, set up my tent, got some firewood, met the neighbors. Around 4PM, I realized I was just wasting time, tucked myself under a sleeping bag, put a headband over my eyes to block out the light, and tried to sleep for a couple hours before dinner. 

Did I sleep? I don’t think so, though I am not sure. My light doze was punctuated by the regular arrival of 100 mile runners arriving at the end of a lap, and the announcer broadcasting their names.  Every time I heard the cheers for a runner, my mind flashed to my own race, the problems that would inevitably arise in this weather, and how I would solve those problems. 

Around 6PM, I woke up, put some pasta on my stove, made a little pre-race spaghetti, and tried to start a fire while waiting for my sister and brother-in-law to show up. With time still to kill, I made sure (for the third time since arriving) that all my gear was organized for my crew to find, and when I had done that, I wasted a good half hour trying, and failing, to start my wood stove. 

On the plus side, I learned that my new hatchet, a christmas present from my wife, works like a charm. 

Kris and Steve showed up between 7:00 and 7:30, and I gave them the brief tour and even more brief instructions. Then they settled into their car and I huddled up in my tent to try and sleep again until it was time, once again, to get up. 

My goal was to sleep until 10:00PM. I would then try to trick my body and mind into thinking it was morning by waking up two hours before the race and going about my morning routine of making oatmeal and coffee. Mother nature, as would be a pattern throughout the race, had different plans. 

Around 9PM or so the graupel started falling. An inch or more of the heavy, wet stuff fell in the next half hour, weighing down my tent until the rainfly sagged into the mesh of the inner tent, and I was forced to knock it off repeatedly. By 9:30, I had given up any attempt to sleep, and Steve and I packed up the tent before it crumpled under the weight of the wet slush covering it. By the time the tent was semi-packed back into the car — a wet, difficult process in the wind and sleet — it was time to wake up and make breakfast. 

So that’s what I did. I boiled water for oatmeal, made coffee, and took a cup to the start line with me to check in. Then it was just a matter of sitting in the car, sipping coffee and listening to a Jim Butcher book on tape, read by James Marsters (who you may remember as the vampire Spike from Buffy), and calming my nerves until it was time to head to the start. 

An aside: James Marsters reading the Dresden Files has a soothing effect on most people. I listen to the books in the background while I work. My wife, on the other hand, listens to the books when she has trouble falling asleep as a soporific. It is, in a word, excellent nerve calming noise.

The start itself was alive with runners, volunteers, and even spectators. I was astounded by the number of people who had made the trek down and shown up for the race, at midnight, in what had now changed from sleet to snow and ice; 170 people showed to attempt the 50 mile race. We stood or bounced around the start area, chatting about how “fun” this was going to be, and how crazy we all were for showing up and attempting this thing. 

And here I made what may have been my only real mistake of the race: I opted to start the race in my waterproof pants. It was wet. It was windy. It was cold. I had a larger pack than most since I was planning to run unsupported for each loop, and I figured that I could always take them off and stow them when they got too warm. 

I should have known better and been more confident in myself. Despite the conditions, it was still above freezing. I had long tights on instead of my planned capris. I knew from a winter of running that I would be plenty warm as long as I kept moving. But to be honest, I was more than a little concerned about the conditions. The RD’s pre race warning (“don’t hesitate to drop at the first aid station 3 miles in. It’s a quick walk back.”) and the reports of 100 milers taking 6-7 hours to complete single laps didn’t help. 

So, with waterproof, nonbreathable pants on, I started with the rest of the field at about 12:10AM on Saturday, April 14.

A bobbing line of headlamps headed into the woods, the winds, the snow, and the mud. 

Lap 1: Oh, the Mud. 

An aside: I am unsure how to present the race itself. Usually I can portray a race at least semi-chronologically. My memories of this race seem to be less linear, and more like impressions, general thoughts, and specific flashes of crystal clear memories than any sort of narrative. Fortunately, I took some snippets of video. So what I’m going to do is post those, and write up the impressions, thoughts, and flashes that I can remember. 

The immediate impression I got off the start line is one of mud. As we left the start/finish area, with many of the lead group missing the turn onto the first climb in the dark and snow, we hit the mud almost immediately. We, the lead group, shuffled order throughout the first climb, settling into our natural paces while attempting to avoid the, at times, calf-deep mud. 

While the first climb felt easy, and I was consciously keeping it that way, I quickly warmed up and started to overheat in my waterproof pants. With no hesitation, I stepped to the side of the trail, about halfway up the climb, and removed them, putting them in the outer mesh pocket of my pack. These would come back to haunt me throughout the race.

We hit aid station one, at mile three, in a group around 35 minutes into the race, exactly on schedule. As planned, I ran straight through, while other runners stopped to have a snack or refill their water bottles. 

The first ten miles or so were the crowded portion of the race. We were all still close enough together that we spent a lot of time within eyeshot of each other. Since it was after midnight, though, my main impressions were of headlamps through the trees, and the color of runners’ jackets.  I followed pink poncho for several miles, and swapped places with yellow jacket throughout the first ten miles of the race.

This was also the time where my sleepy mind realized that, if I wanted to hit my target goal of 200-250 calories per hour, I needed to eat not every half hour, as I’d planned, but every 35 minutes. While that might not seem like much of a difference, 35 minutes is a much harder interval to calculate on a watch than is a half hour. Instead of using the laps on my watch to calculate the time/distance between aid stations, I started clicking a lap in some multiple of 35 minutes (usually 1:45) to be sure I stayed on top of my nutrition. This proved to be a good system for me, and kept me from bonking the way I have in prior races. 

I found it a little eerie, really, running through a snowstorm in the dark.  My headlamp and flashlight, a combination I’ve used to great effect in the past, illuminated little more than a short section of trail and a cone of snowflakes swirling and blowing in the air in front of me. With the world thus constricted, climbs disappeared in front of me, and the trail was a mystery. 

This constriction was relieved only by the headlamps of other runners ahead and behind me on the course. I couldn’t always be sure how far the other headlamps were away from me, but there were few times out on the course where I could not at least glimpse a light bobbing through the trees ahead of me or behind me. 

Between Aid Stations two and three (which are actually at the same location), I started running with yellow jacket. We started chatting occasionally — you might be amazed by how much trail runners talk during a race — I introduced myself, and he told me his name was Darren. And so we ran together down the trail in the dark, two motes of light traveling through dark woods.  

I would wonder what the animals thought, seeing so many runners out on the trail at night, but most of them seemed to be smarter than us, hunkering down and riding out the storm in shelter instead of running through it. 

After Aid three, we picked up another runner, Sam, and made our way up to the ridge portion of the course. Here, off to the right you can see the start and finish area in the distance, and the glow of the aid stations through the trees. To the left, there’s an open field, invisible in the darkness. 

We didn’t spare a thought for those, though. The wind had blown the snow across the field, creating cornices that stretched across the trail. It was windy enough, and snowing enough, that the footprints of the runners in front of us were at times invisible, though we 50 milers were still clustered together. And the waffle I was eating, though kept warm in my waist belt until this point, quickly froze, forcing me to gnaw on it before swallowing. 

We post-holed our way along the ridge section, and found that the downhill portion down from the ridge, which is the only technically difficult portion of the race most years, had been mellowed out to the point that Sam didn’t even recognize it as the famed “rocky section” he had heard about from a friend. The sharp points of the rocks had been smoothed over to the point of ease. We cruised down the hill and on to the gravel road section together, and ran the full mile along the road, across the bridge, and into the aid station three abreast. 

Unfortunately I lost their company at AS4, as I continued to skip the aid stations and run unsupported. The aid station volunteers seemed a bit confused (a startled “Really?!? sounded out at one when I said I didn’t need anything and kept right on running), but I had my plan and it was working well so far. The remaining 2.7 miles to the start/finish area passed quickly and easily, if muddily, and I rolled in after a 3:20 lap at 3:30 in the morning. 

At this point, I think two things are worth noting. The first is the conditions. There were two prevailing trail surfaces: snow/ice, and mud. In places the mud was calf deep, forming a trench where you either slogged through the middle, or chances the icy conditions off-trail. Where it wasn’t muddy, it was packed snow turning to ice.  The weather wasn’t getting any better, either. The temperature was dropping, and a crust of ice was forming on top of the mud. 

The other note is my mental space. I had a card in my chest pocket listing the aid stations and the distances between them. After aid station, I took out that card, and reset my race to consist only of the distance to the next aid station. It’s a common trick for ultra-runners: breaking down the overwhelming distance into smaller, manageable chunks. 

Interlude: Aid Stop

As planned, I took aid at the start/finish area. My crew was there with my array of stuff, helping me to refill my food belt. Jamison refilled my water reservoir for me. And Austin, a runner I met last year at the Lost in the Woods 50k, was volunteering, and I grabbed some coffee from him. I also nabbed a slice of bacon, because hey, bacon!

I opted to stay in the same shoes and socks, as I thought it was just barely above freezing at this point, and the combo had worked well so far. My feet (which I had asked my sister to quiz me on) were doing well, but I wanted to adjust my socks and tightened my laces. But I had just run 17 miles through mud and standing water, and my laces were frozen into masses of ice. 

A clearer-thinking me would have realized that this meant it was below freezing outside, and I should switch to my spiked shoes. Unfortunately I didn’t think about that, so ended up first thawing out my laces in the warming tent, then readjusting my socks, tying my shoes tighter, and heading back out into the night. 

Loop 2: Cold, Wind, and Daylight. 

Loop two started off in a rough way. I realized that I had missed a fuel up timer at the start/finish aid station, and grabbed a stroopwaffle to eat from my belt. Problem was, I had to take my gloves off to open the package, and it had rapidly gotten colder. My hands, slightly wet from my up-until-then too-warm gloves, chilled rapidly, and I knew I’d have to take care of them before they became a race-ender.

I will say it now: hot-packs are the best things ever! I pulled out a package, tore it open, and put one at the end of each of my gloves. 

My fingers properly warmed, my big toes started getting cold: maybe a reaction to warming up in the tent and then cooling down so quickly on the trail. There was less that I could do about that than my fingers, but I used the one trick I knew. For the next several minutes time I picked up my foot, I actively scrunched my toes to get the circulation going again. I resolved that if this didn’t work, I would pull myself out of the race at the next aid station. A finish is not worth a toe. 

Spoiler alert: it worked. 

Though I was, as I told another runner (PJ, who was on the trail looking to team up with Sam, from lap one) “feeling more tired than I wanted to at this point in the race.” I had not been pushing at all, in lap one. Every step had felt easy.  But the mud and the weather made fatigue inevitable even at a modest pace. 

So after aid station one (mark II) I started walking more. I prefer to run the more moderate uphills, even in an ultra: it just feels better to me to run rather than hike. But at this point, I knew I needed to conserve energy if I were going to make it through the rest of the race. Already, there was a little voice in my head suggesting that I pull out at the end of the lap. 

That voice is there in every race I run. 5k or 50k, the distance doesn’t matter. At some point, if you’re truly pushing yourself the little voice in your head will pop up asking “why?” 

You’d better have a good answer. 

I had my answer: this was preparation for another challenge. I knew I could finish this lap and keep going. I’d had a pain in my left knee in the first lap, but that had gone away. I had an ache in my right quad later on, and that had gone away. I was walking more, and I knew this lap was going to take quite a bit longer than the first one, but even so I knew that I could make it. 

So I kept going. 

My headlight started to noticeably dim between AS one and two on lap two. Rated for 60 hours on high, it was only about 4 1/2 hours into its charge and was already dimming. The cold will do that. And so, at AS2, I stopped and, in a slight break of my self-supportedness, I asked a volunteer to change my batteries while I dug out some actual food (beef jerky, as the sweetness of the gels and waffles was beginning to turn my stomach) and the liner gloves I’d packed for my mittens. 

Beef jerky. Salty, chewy, filling. It was heaven. 

The change in batteries made all the difference, and I headed off for the next “race” with a mental boost from the added visibility. Adding to that mental boost, on this short (2.7 mile) section of the course, it started to get light out as, somewhere behind the clouds, the sun rose. 

I’ve heard, often, about what a difference daybreak makes when you’ve been running all night. Often, the hours between three and five in the morning are the most difficult for runners. It’s the most foreign.  Your mind shuts down just a bit even if you’re still awake. And then day breaks, and you get a fresh boost of mental energy no matter how fatigued you are. 

It was a strange combination for me. I felt the mental boost, but at the same time, this was the first time all race that I really began to feel the fact that I hadn’t slept in almost 24 hours. Even so, as you can hear in the video below, I was more than a little happy to see night give way to day, even if it was gray, cloudy, and (holy crap it was) windy. 

The daylight got me through that little section, and I once again passed directly through the next aid station without stopping. As I climbed out of the gully, towards the notorious ridge, I noticed something new, and troubling: there were a lot of branches down. In fact, they were fairly carpeting the trail and the woods. Just as I had that thought, I heard a crack above me and another branch crashed to the ground within a few feet of me. It was a small branch, fortunately, but still enough to make me jump. 

So here we are, back where we started, on the ridge. Trees are down. I’m post-holing through the fresh-blown cornices. And my vision is blurring in my left eye. 

Looking back now, I’m 90% sure it was irritation caused by the wind, blowing steadily from my left side. At the time, I was freaking out just a bit. With one eye blurry, depth perception, an issue for me at the best of times (I had surgery for it when I was 13. Before that I didn’t have any depth perception to speak of), faded quickly. 

Running an icy, technical trail, downhill, with one eye, and severe fatigue, is not something I recommend. 

I took it slowly down the technical section. It was yet more icy and slick now, and with the added difficulty of vision issues, I didn’t want to risk injury. It took longer than I would like to get down off the ridge and onto the gravel road (really? is there gravel under all that snow, mud, and ice? I don’t see any gravel!). 

With the daylight, it seemed like a new course, and maybe even a new race. The parts I traversed in both daylight and night looked so different from each other that, had I not known better, I would never have realized I was repeating the same loop. Details in the woods to either side were clear now, and I saw a crumbled stone building that I had no idea was just off the road when I passed that way four hours earlier. Off to my left, the Zumbro river emerged. While I had crossed it three times already, I hadn’t really been able to see it muddy water until now.

Across the bridge for the fourth time, and I made my call: I would run to the finish, give myself a five minute break, and decide there, with the support of my crew and the race volunteers, whether it was reasonable to go out on lap three. I threw my plan for an unsupported lap out the window, took a bathroom break at the aid station, downed a cup of broth (broth is amazing at mile 30 of a cold race) and started the 2.7 mile trek to the finish. 

Decision made (or at least plan of action made) the last section passed quickly, mostly at a run, and I made my way into the start/finish area just before 8AM. 

The start/finish at 7:30AM. That's my sister!

My crew was there, the volunteers were there. I told them the situation, and we headed into the tent to warm me up. I knew that if I was going to go out for another lap, I’d need different shoes and socks, so I took off my current pairs and dried my feet by the fire as Steve talked to the doctor. (“Oh, yeah. That can happen.” was essentially what he said. More on that later). 

I quickly realized how foolish it would be for me to take on another lap with, essentially, one eye. 

I pulled myself from the race. John (the race director) took my race number with a concerned look and told me to take care of myself. 

Post Race Assessment

I broke down crying twice on the way to the car to pack up. Not from disappointment or regret. Honestly, I break down after most long races. Long, mentally difficult races break you down and force you to put yourself back together, sometimes multiple times in a race. I don’t break down because of fatigue, or the finality of the finish or DNF, I think it’s just an emotional reset. 

We decided that my sister would drive me and my car home, caravanning with her husband. On the way out of the campground, My brother in law stopped by to check in on some friends and make sure they’d get home, and ran into the race doctor. The doctor thought he’d made it clear that I was a medical pull: I wasn’t allowed to go back out on the course. 

While that wasn’t clear from what he said to me, it did make me happy to know that my own decision was definitely the correct one.

My goals for the race, again, were: 

1. Sorting out some fueling options for a longer effort. 
2. Test out at least some gear options. 
3. Test whether I can go long periods without aid. 
4. Test whether I can make sound, clear headed decisions when I am mentally and physically fatigued. 

1. I realized that I need both real food and gels for a long effort. 225 calories per hour doesn’t quite do it for me, as my stomach still growls. I also need a combination of savory/salty and sweet, otherwise my stomach rebels. 
2. My gear worked reasonably well. I think, for a longer, warmer effort, I’ll want a pack with more, and bigger, pockets up front. I don’t want to use my old Ultimate Direction SJ vest, so I may have to make one more purchase before the BRT comes up. 
3. This was an unequivocal success. I stopped at aid stations three times. First, to use a restroom. Second, to change batteries (something I could have done on my own, but saw no reason to). And third, to stop at the restroom and have some broth when I was 95% sure my race was done. 
4. Also an unequivocal success: I pulled myself when it was no longer safe for me to continue. 

This, I already know, was a defining race for me. I started in difficult conditions, and made it 34 miles. I pulled out of the race when it was the right decision for me. I kept a good outward attitude the entire time, joking and talking with other runners when I saw them. 

And after the race, I honestly feel different. I pushed myself so far in this race that other tasks seem easier. I caught the ultra bug in a big way, to the point where I almost signed up for another ultra two weeks from the Zumbro. I opted not to, because I want to focus on the BRT for the near future. 

Even in my every day life I feel different. I don’t know how to say it other than I feel lighter. I feel less anxious in every day life. I don’t know how, and I don’t really know why, but I have actually changed based on this experience. And I feel like I’m ready to shift towards tarting my running-related ventures: coaching, and other ideas that I have not yet fully been able to articulate. 

Zumbro 2018: an epic by any standards. 

Coda: 

As I noted earlier: I had a cheat sheet in my pocket with the distances between aid stations. I didn’t realize this when I wrote it on the back of a piece of card that came from Paper Source. After the race, I looked at the back and saw this quotation on it:

“Legends say that hummingbirds float free of time, carrying our hopes for love, joy, and celebration. The hummingbird’s delicate grace reminds us that life is rich, beauty is everywhere, every personal connection has meaning and that laughter is life’s sweetest creation.” 

It seems appropriate. 

Gear: 

Shoes: Altra Superiors 3.5. 

Socks: Injinji NuWool Hikers

Tights: Old GoLites I bought in Boulder

Shirt: Under Armor Running shirt

Jacket: GoLite Rain Jacket

Gloves: Hestra all the way!

Hat: Mizuno WindStopper

Pack: Patagonia ForeRunner 10L with HydraPak Reservoir

Food: 6 each of Honeystinger Waffles and VFuel Peach Cobbler. A couple ounces of beef jerky. A cup of broth, a strip of bacon, and a cup of coffee. 

Post Race Coma