Sat, 22 Jul 2023
Speedgoat 50k
Awhile back, my former roommate Brad pitched a race to me. It was called the Speedgoat 50k and he suggested we should run it together. Like the dumbass I am, I signed up for it, and then looked into it. The race itself is a brutalist monument to sadomasochism. It’s a sufferfest from end to end. My first 50-miler had roughly 11,300 feet of elevation gain throughout the course. This 50k had around 11,600. That’s slightly more elevation gain with significantly fewer miles.
In the lead up to the race, I wasn’t able to get nearly as much altitude or elevation training as I needed. I live in Seattle, which—in case you weren’t familiar—exists at sea level. So virtually all my running is here in the city and fitness at sea level does not translate to fitness at altitude. Instead, at those higher elevations, that fitness dissipates and fades into thin air (very, very thin air).
When Brad and I arrived in Utah, I could already feel it, the altitude. And when we drove up to the race check in and packet pickup at the starting area up in Snowbird Resort, I could really feel it.
At the same time, I knew all of this going in (once I thought to actually look at the race profile) so I wasn’t blindsided by unrealistic expectations. I hydrated like nobody’s business and ate more calories than usual in the week preceding the race. I aimed to at least take advantage of every possible factor I could control in hopes of offsetting my severe oxygenic disadvantage.
The energy at the race check in was infectious. Both Brad and I were pretty amped to hit the course. And on the morning of race day, as they counted us down, the reality of the event settled in. The ten count reached zero and, just like that, we were off with all the rest of the participants.
For the first several miles, Brad and I ran (read: mostly power hiked) together. We were vibing and just feeling the energy of the moment. Right off the bat, we climbed. As we scaled the hills near Snowbird Resort up to the foremost aid station, the sun claimed the sky and we discovered that I’d brought my sunglasses case, but had forgotten to put my sunglasses inside it. My retinas were in for as much of an ultra as my legs and lungs.
After some refreshments at the aid station, we bombed down some crazy technical trails. I say “trails”, but really, I mean loose rock and rolled ankles. I almost bit it hard about four hundred nineteen times.
On the next ascent, Brad’s Boulder, CO lungs did what Seattle, WA lungs could not and he pulled away, putting some serious distance between us. I ended up catching him again after he had some trouble with his quad, but he once again left me in the dust shortly after getting some electrolytes in his system. I would not see him again for the rest of the race.
Along the course, I listened to Typhoon’s entire discography (+ Kyle Morton’s solo work) one and a half times. It was so incredibly fitting. Many of their songs speak to mortality and suffering and temporal transience and the fallibility of human memory and appreciating the moment you’re experiencing now because it won’t happen again. The parallel musical journey I embarked on was a lyrical microcosm of ultrarunning. And in a strange twist of fate, Kyle Morton’s lyrics often cite back to an illness brought on by a bug bite, which was thematically apropos as I got bit or stung by some winged insect on one of the early and devastatingly cruel ascents (though I’m not thinking this act of insectoid violence will be of potentially mortal seriousness).
***
I’ve run a number of ultras before. Not many sanctioned, official races with bibs and medals and the like; I just enjoy running. On my 30th birthday, for example, I ran thirty miles—just because. I knew what to expect from the distance. And I conceptually understood what to expect from the altitude, but I didn’t experientially understand how the altitude would feel to its fullest extent.
Thus, when I started to hurt, I wasn’t surprised and I wasn’t perturbed by it. It’s all part of it. Running ultras is a painful pastime. Plus, if anything, I hurt significantly less than I expected in terms of muscular sensation. This race, though, did not merely bring the incidental pain of running 30+ miles; rather, pain was a premier feature of the race from concept to execution. The sadistic care with which the altitude was planned and delivered was downright maniacal in its implementation.
Even so, it wasn’t until a particular (and particularly fucked up) ascent that my conceptual understanding of what I was doing yielded to pragmatic experience, and it broke me. The aforementioned ascent was, essentially, a scramble straight up a mountain of loose gravel for god only knows how long. The altitude had me feeling disoriented and as the ascent progressively worsened, I could feel gravity’s pull on me; it felt like I might just fall off the surface of the earth and float out into space. I couldn’t look back or up, I could look nowhere except at the patch of gravely dirt directly before my feet.
My heart rate increased, but not from exertion. My already labored breathing quickened apace. I had a terrifying realization in the thinning atmosphere: I’m about to have a panic attack.
A number of folks were ahead of me and the arguably traversable terrain at this particular juncture was only wide enough for one individual to negotiate at a time. Because of my sudden spike in adrenaline, I was moving quick (in relative terms) and I rapidly caught up to the person in front of me.
I desperately wanted to pass, but I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t verbalize my desire to move faster than we were moving and ask him to move to the side briefly so I could flee gravity. I continually caught him and paused, caught him and paused, caught him and paused. Each pause was an opportunity for a full-blown meltdown to shatter me on the side of that mountain.
It was all I could do to keep my head together. Silently, I talked myself through the experience. “You’re about to have a panic attack,” I said internally. “That cannot happen here. Once we reach the top, you can let your body and mind do whatever the fuck it needs to do, but you absolutely cannot have a meltdown right here.”
Eventually, the “trail” widened a bit and I was able to pass. I cruised up the ascent and passed several more people. As I neared the top of the climb I also neared the next aid station. Onlookers and spectators began to appear and they told me “Good job!” and cheered me on. They seemed impressed by my speed, not knowing that I was moments away from a mental breakdown and primally spurred upward by nothing more than adrenaline and cortisol.
After the brief eternity of frantically clawing my way up that scree, I paused to drink some water and begged my nervous system to calm itself. I gathered enough of my wits to carry on and, a mile and some change later, I reached the next aid station. I asked the volunteers if there were any ascents or descents like the one I’d just completed. My body felt great, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to mentally handle another of those, especially if I had to navigate downward in the same conditions.
I learned there were a few ridges ahead—and definitely more climbing—but nothing like what I’d just conquered. I stayed at that aid station for a while to wait and see if the panic attack would hit me. My tremulous extremities teetered on the brink of that numbing sensation you get just before you hyperventilate. For the first time in any race I’ve ever done, I seriously considered dropping. I didn’t know whether I possessed the mental fortitude necessary to carry on.
At this point, I engaged myself in what those familiar with the Internal Family Systems therapeutic modality would likely call Parts work. I closed my eyes, went inside, and let the panicky Part of me know that I was listening. I told it if it needed me to quit now, I would. I’d already come further than I had any right to in terms of what my readiness for the altitude and elevation should allow. My panicky Part relaxed a little, trusting that I wasn’t going to force it to do something it didn’t believe it could do.
The aid station volunteers were incredibly wonderful and supportive and, at about this point, one of them came over and said, “Hey, I don’t know if this helps, but if you leave here, take ten steps, and realize you can’t keep going, you can come back. If you go a mile or more and realize you need to drop, you can come back here and drop.”
That was it; that was the spark I needed. She was right. By reembarking, I wasn’t committing to anything in particular—I was allowing the possibility of continuance. By dropping here, however, I would be committing to the premature termination of the race. With that reframing in mind, the choice suddenly became a binary: possibility or permanence? I chose possibility. I told myself that I could turn back if shit got too unbearable.
***
For a short time, the path was wide and, in theory, runnable. I dropped in altitude significantly. My head cleared a little and I started to feel okay-ish. I ran intermittently during this stretch and turned back to Typhoon’s music to carry me onward.
But then, another climb stared me down, menacing and defiant. It was the worst by far in terms of extended topographical imposition. The terrain wasn’t as panic-inducing as the former ascent, but the atmospheric forces it brought to bear on what remained of my physical prowess were as borderline debilitating to my soma as the prior godforsaken scree had been to my cognition.
The pounding crescendo in my head intensified in tandem with my wavering ascension, threatening to pulsate fervently enough to eject the eyes right out of my skull. At a certain point, it felt like I had indeed found the race’s titular speedgoat, and it promptly kicked me in the brain. The fiery brightness of the irradiating high-altitude sun—combined with my negligent lack of sunglasses—didn’t do me any favors, either.
But I kept moving. At that point, there really was nothing for it: I was far closer to the peak than the prior aid station. If I needed to, I could drop from the race there. Once again, I thought this a likely course of events. I was fairly certain Speedgoat would be my first DNF (“did not finish”). My mind was utterly broken. The altitude was really fucking with my head—my judgment, my cognition—and I simply could not find confidence in my capacity to carry on.
As I reached the final approach to the last major peak, the penultimate climb, the highest point of the race, I cried. Well, that’s underselling it a bit. I bawled, sobbed. I realized then that I was going to reach the top and the profundity of that accomplishment by itself could only be expressed through tears. (Though I’d be lying if I said the excruciating and infinitely recursive explosions in my head weren’t also a significant factor.)
When I reached the top, I genuinely still believed I was going to drop. I didn’t think there was any way I would be able to make it all the way back down. Even so, I was proud of already achieving what I believed to be impossible for me.
I thought back on the primary reason I haven’t been able to train at altitude hardly at all over the past several months: for more than a year, I’ve been in a prolonged state of autistic burnout and depression that has yet to abate and—while I’ve certainly been working hard on improving internal mental states, external realities, and have been seeing legitimate progress—I still think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
I haven’t been able to drive (without significant cognitive distress) on an extracurricular basis for months and months and I’ve been too burnt out to ask if others would like to carpool to local trailheads. I’m fortunate enough that I have a couple friends who invited me to events that got me about halfway up to the altitude I needed a few times in the weeks leading up to the race and, without those invites, there’s zero chance I would have made it this far.
In this way, Speedgoat transformed into something of an analogy for me; I noticed noteworthy parallels between my performance in this race and the first twenty-nine years of my life as an unidentified Autistic person.
Being Autistic in the modern world is like being the only one with sea-level lungs at a high-altitude ultramarathon with obscene vertical gain. Folks who have the capacity to train at altitude have a significant advantage over me. Sure, they struggle as well, but their bodies and brains aren’t ravaged in the way mine is. It called to mind visions of my life before I knew I was Autistic, looking around at my friends and peers, believing we were all experiencing the world in the same way, believing I was uniquely bad at coping with it, not understanding that my perception was entirely different from that of my allistic counterparts.
Now knowing this, I recognize the reality of my experience and that of most others is not an apples to apples comparison—I have different strengths and different challenges. Similarly, given the circumstances and the context surrounding the race for me individually, I was happy and proud of reaching the peak. Without comparing myself to others around me, I felt I could tap out with no regrets or sense of disappointment. I had already done something I didn’t think I’d be able to do.
But the volunteers at this aid station were as remarkable as all the volunteers had been up to now. One in particular really helped me understand why my head was feeling the way it was and gave me some tips on mitigation as well as what I could expect if I chose to continue (and she also pointed me to the bathroom, which was truly a game changer for my ability to keep anything down, allowing me to ingest much needed calories).
With her words of wisdom echoing in my consciousness, I decided to go for it. My head felt marginally better after a little Coca Cola—something about the caffeine allowed me to stand without wanting to die—so I grabbed my pack and my poles and set off once again. I embarked on the descent.
Sure enough, just as the aid station volunteer forecasted, the lowering altitude had a dramatic effect on my head. I felt better and better with every step I took toward sea level. I experienced another first during this descent as well: I used my jacket as a sled and slid down a lengthy snowfield, quickly dropping in altitude without exerting energy. I whooped with glee at the first type one fun I’d experienced for hours and hours.
Little sledding adventure notwithstanding, those latter miles were not easy. The downhill was as punishing on my lower extremities as the uphill had been on my brain and, by this time in the race, my pack was bruising me. Something must have shifted with the jostling and now dug right into the middle of my lower back, which was intermittently agonizing, especially when I resumed running after walking for any amount of time (which happened frequently).
Still, I began to feel like the worst was over and I was in the clear. Another participant ran past me and I called out to inquire how far in we were. (I’ve been flying blind and running this race without any GPS because my Garmin broke a few weeks ago.) “My watch says 44k!” he called back. “That means I’ve probably got less than a 10k left, give or take,” I thought, delighted. My spirits soared.
And then I ran out of water. I’d been too disoriented at the summit to think about refilling the bladder in my pack prior to making my descent. I had some ambiguously short distance to travel in the blazing heat with no water and one last climb left, albeit child’s play compared with the climbs up to this point.
The altitudinous amelioration of my cranial condition rapidly dissipated as my mouth steadily dried with no way to mitigate that deleterious progression. The effects of heat and onset of dehydration gripped me much faster than I feared they would, which throttled my head further. And while I may have been lower in altitude than at the last aid station, I was still nearly 9,000 feet higher than I’m used to.
The finish line was remarkably close. And yet, it felt as far as it ever had throughout the entire course up to now. Several runners passed me and I wanted to ask each of them how far their watches were telling them we had left. I didn’t. They were all just as battered and broken as I was and I didn’t want to add an additional imposition to their quest for the finish.
At this point, all I could do was carry on. I was close enough that I knew I would finish, I just didn’t know how long it would take me or how damaged I would be by the end. I wished for even just a little water I could sip on, but felt that was a vain hope. That is, until I rounded a bend in the trail and saw a goddamn hydration station. I drank a few cups of water and then partially filled my bladder before heading back out. The volunteer informed me I was less than two miles away from the end now.
It was the longest 1.7 miles of my fucking life. I existed beyond temporal perception during the entirety of the race but never more so than in those last 1.7 miles. Gradually, the course markers increased in both frequency and levels of elaborateness, transitioning from tiny blue flags to inflated Hoka-branded pillars to lines of myriad blue conical markers urging runners along to the final approach.
I rounded one last corner to find myself leaving the trail and entering a synthetic, concrete pathway leading to Speedgoat’s ultimate terminus. And I fucking crossed it on my own two feet.