Summing Up Reach the Beach 2009: Running, Logistics, Volunteers, Camaraderie, Food, Spirit

Our team, The Flyboys (not named for any of the members aeronautical proclivities, but a legacy from a runner no longer even on the team) finished the 11th Reach the Beach in 27:20 minutes, running the 207 miles at an average 7:54 second average pace. (Though our official time is 29:20 – we were docked two hours for a technical infraction we’re still trying to figure out, though it hardly matters now.) There were six of us, in order of our rotation: Curt, Gary, Liz, Eric, John, and me. Each of us ran six legs in those 27 hours.  Some ran more miles than others.  Some ran heavier duty hills. For those interested, my average pace was 7:13, of which I was proud, though I admit I had fast, easy terrain and a moderate (compared to some of the assignments that ranged all the way up to 39 miles!) 34 miles to cover.

We gathered at a parking lot in Merrimack at 6:30 Friday morning, Sept. 18, and packed Eric’s Suburban with food and gear – enough running clothes for six legs each in weather conditions ranging from chill northern New Hampshire fall rain to sunshine to cold mountain nights. For some of us, it was the first time we’d ever met. We drove north to Cannon Mountain, where at 10:40 a.m., after an extensive orientation with hundreds of other runners, gear safety check including our headlamps, blinking lights and reflective vests for the night legs, registration and team photo, our first runner, Curt started our team out toward Bretton Woods, the stark beauty of Crawford Notch, the valleys, the lakes, the rolling hills of southern New Hampshire, the sweet salt and apple tang of the seacoast.

The Logistics – An Endless Procession of White Vans

There were more than 400 teams in the race. Most of the teams were made up of 12 runners split between two rented white vans. Some of the teams, such as ours, were “ultra” teams, with only six runners and one vehicle to cover the same distance.  The race started at different times for different teams, depending on each teams’ runners’ projected mile paces.  Ideally this would make for a manageable range of finish times.  As each runner went out, the vans would wait a bit, then head down the same road, providing the runner with support (water, food, etc.) if needed before looping around to the next transition area. There the next runner would get warmed up and geared up (in reflective vest, lamp and safety blinkers if at night) and wait for the arriving runner. A wrist band served as a baton, and as it was passed the waiting runner headed out while the arriving runner cooled down, changed clothes, ate something and got ready to travel.  In the case of our ultra team, another runner would be supporting, another driving, another navigating, etc.  We were always busy.  I slept for forty five minutes during the whole event, and hardly even noticed.  It would be hard to imagine, if you didn’t see it, what the result of this process was by two or three in the morning – a stream of white vans and runners winding their way through narrow back roads in the Lakes Region heading toward Southern New Hampshire and the Seacoast, an endless parade of headlights and bobbing headlamps, of blinking red lights and straining legs and hearts and lungs.

The Volunteers

The complexity of such an endeavor is obvious, and I’m in awe of not only the race organizers, but the army of volunteers and race workers who made this possible.  That such a huge crowd of runners and vehicles could be successfully herded through so many transition areas and towns with so little conflict is amazing. And at many of the transition areas, beyond the flaggers who guided vans in and out of parking, and officials who saw runners off at the line, there were the good people of the small towns, of the church committees and school parent groups, volunteer firemen and girl scouts and innumerable others who labored through the day and night and day again to provide food, hot drinks and entertainment for the runners.

The Camaraderie – A Language of Running

I said earlier that some of us were strangers when we met that morning in the Merrimack parking lot. I only knew Curt, for example, and Liz only knew Gary, and Curt only knew Gary and me, or something like that. In any case, by the time the race was over, I felt like I knew everyone very well, through in retrospect, I don’t think we poured out a lot of deeply personal information as we drove and ran through the night. Sure we talked about our families, and what we did for work, but mostly we made small talk, or talked about running, and about the work of the race, and what we’d do next, and who was going to drive, and what the last split had been, and was it cold enough at 2 a.m. for running tights or would shorts still be enough.  But in that simple language, in those conditions, when everybody is tired and that drawn but determined look is on their faces when they get out of the van to run, and that relieved, and sometimes exuberant look is on their faces when they get back in, and you’re always glad for them, you feel as though you might have known them for years. They were fine people.  It’s a different kind of language you speak in those times, a sort of simple clarity and sincerity of expression you find often only in extremis.

The Food

One thing I’d guess runners always think about is food. What sort will sit well in their stomachs during a run, how soon before a run they can eat, what gives the best energy and what will provide for the fastest recovery, what food heals torn muscle fibers and replenishes glycogen stores. This run, with its six legs and no real long breaks, was a special challenge for some folks, I think.  If you don’t feel like you can eat and then run without feeling ill, you have to run without eating. And after a while that means you’re running on fumes. I saw some runners deal with some powerful calorie deficiencies by sheer force of will alone.  Happily, I had no such issues: I can eat anything (I think) before I run, and in fact must eat something fairly soon before a run or I don’t feel right. So I ate the food I brought (cold pasta with olive oil, salt and chick peas, hardboiled eggs, trail mix with nuts, raisins and M&Ms, banana, Mineolas, Power Bars, oatmeal raisin cookies, Gatorade, water, coffee) and the food served at the stations along the way (chicken soup, hamburgers, more soup, hot chocolate, more coffee, pancakes, scrambled eggs, ham, more bananas). I don’t want to make it sound like I ate like a glutton – sometimes I ate handfuls here and there, not whole servings of things, but I never felt like I was run down, and I still had a good amount of energy for the last leg, despite having slept for only 45 minutes the whole time. I attribute much of that to the food.

The Spiritual – Running Into God

It’s sometimes hard for me to separate running from prayer.  Long runs, especially, seem to strip away all the noisy things in my head that otherwise drown out the pure silence and the “still, small voice.”  I hear that voice on the longest of my long runs, and it seems like my heart opens out until it contains the whole of the road and sky.  That’s the way I felt on leg four of this run.  At 5:13 a.m., aching, tired, sleepy, cold, shivering, at the transition area, I took the wrist-band baton from John and began to run. And as it had on each prior leg, the cold and exhaustion fell away and the rhythm of running replaced it and I was warm and felt good.  Then somewhere during that seven mile stretch of rolling hills and night road, I looked up and saw how crisp and sharp the stars were in the velvet black sky, and I felt broken in the best sort of way, absolutely sure that I was no longer running under my own power, and grateful for that, because even though it was the fourth leg and I was running it faster than any of the prior three, it felt like coasting, like drifting, and I was gaining speed even up the hills, and I said part of a rosary, counting the prayers off on my fingers for a while until I couldn’t keep the train of thought, and then I just ran again, happy and light, until I got to Bear Brook State Park.  I ate pancakes and ham served by volunteers at the pavilion, and I mentioned in passing to one of my teammates what my fourth leg had been like. “Running humbles you,” he said. Just so.

The End

We finished, and it was just in time, because I don’t think I had anything left.  But it was still too soon. The combination of road trip and ultra marathon provided a new look at familiar roads, and a new sense of being at home in the state I call home.  Kris and the kids were waiting for me at the finish line and I’d missed them a great deal.  We went and sat on the sand, and the kids played, but I was too tired to do anything but watch them.  And when we got home we ordered pizza and I lay on the couch with the family watching television, and my eyes closed, just for an instant, and it was 12 hours later.

Tags: extreme, New Hampshire, reach the beach, relay, Running, ultra

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