Race: Squamish 50
Shoes: New Balance MT10 (first 33 miles), Topo Terraventure (remainder)
Distance: 50 miles
****
Way back in November of 2017, I signed up for my first fifty-mile ultramarathon. I didn’t realize then how hard the course would be, even compared to other fifty-mile races. It wasn’t until a month after signing up that I began hearing testimonials regarding the difficulty.
“Well, shit,” I thought. “I may have bitten off more than I can chew.”
The course is a winding, single-track escapade through the mountains around Squamish, BC. Throughout the fifty miles, you have to battle something like 11,000 feet of elevation gain, and because it starts at sea level, you have to deal with around 22,000 feet of change.
There are brutal climbs scattered all along the course, but three in particular are especially obscene. Of those, one is something like 2,500 feet of gain in the span of four kilometers.
Nevertheless, here I am. In my car, driving northward from Tacoma to Oak Harbor where I will meet up with my family. They’ll be my crew for this race: mom, dad, and my little sister. And, while my younger brother can’t make the race, I task him with the important job of putting together an ultramarathon playlist to keep me going when the going gets tough. It’s a bit like a family outing.
****
I’ve been on the taper. It’s Thursday and I’ve only put in twenty miles this week. Ordinarily, I’ll put in twice that…more if I’m in the peak of my training for a race like this. My muscles are vibrating with anticipation. They’re confused. They don’t understand why they’ve been complacent as much as they have.
“Soon,” I tell them. “Soon.”
I reach Seattle. Traffic comes to a standstill. For the next two hours, I don’t reach any speed higher than 10 MPH. In addition, the driver’s seat in my car pitches to the right. Any trip longer than about thirty or forty minutes is unpleasant and gives me all sorts of leg cramps.
By the time I finally break free of traffic and scream down the highway to Oak Harbor, I’m not feeling super great. If my legs had tear ducts they’d be bawling.
But I finally reach my transitional destination and begin to unwind from the hellish drive.
“I don’t see how the race will be more unpleasant than that traffic,” I tell my family. I will learn.
****
The drive from Oak Harbor to Squamish is far less painful. The border crossing is the worst of it and even that is nothing contrasted with two hours of standstill traffic in a car that likes to hand out leg cramps like candy.
When we reach the hotel, we check in and pack our bags up to the room, promptly finding packet pickup shortly thereafter. I collect my bib, and we ask for directions to the starting line.
We eat dinner. We’re all hungry after a few hours on the road. Once we’ve finished eating, we set out in search of the starting line. We want to know where it is in relation to the hotel so we aren’t searching for it aimlessly at five in the morning.
Our hotel is only about fifteen minutes from the start. Beautiful. Simplicity is a wonderful thing when it comes to an event such as this. The less you have to worry about, the better.
****
Sleep doesn’t come quickly, but when it does arrive, I sleep quite well. I wake at 3:50am and start getting ready. I’m equal parts excited and terrified. I have never made an attempt at something so ruthlessly challenging, but I don’t get in my head about it. I treat the morning’s prep work no differently than I would any other trail run. This trail run just also happens to be the longest I’ve ever attempted.
My family is up at 4am. They’re troopers. For as long a day as I’m about to have, theirs isn’t going to be any shorter, they just won’t have to move their feet as much. They’ll be meeting me at a few of the aid stations to provide me with food, my massage tools, and changes of clothes and shoes. Theirs is a waiting game with many hours of little to no action.
Satisfied I’m ready to go and that we have a plan in place, we all hop in the car and head down to the starting line. I’m relieved to discover there are outhouses nearby. I shed a little weight and hurry to the start where Gary Robbins, race director and ultramarathoner, is going through some housekeeping and announcements.
As Gary speaks, my anticipation rises. My legs are bouncing, as if to say, “We’re ready, Jesse. Let’s do this shit.”
Towards the end of the announcements, Gary introduces a runner who will be competing in this race. Her name is Courtney Dauwalter and she’s incredible. She won the Moab 240 outright by a ten-hour margin.
“How many guys are going to beat her in this race?” Gary asks, and then answers his own question with a sing-songy falsetto, “Not many.”
I laugh. He’s not wrong.
With all the pre-race logistics out of the way, it’s finally time for the event to get underway. Gary counts us off and the race begins. My legs are eternally grateful to finally move again. I can hear their whispered thanks as my muscles finally feel the satisfaction of running once again. Although, they should probably save their thanks for the end. They might not be so inclined by the time we’re done here.
****
The first twelve or so miles pass without much event. These are the easiest miles. I don’t even bother stopping at the first aid station. There’s no point. I’m feeling good.
My pace is a little faster than I want it to be, but I’m staying vigilant as it pertains to my perceived rate of effort. I relax into my cadence and just let my body do what it does, staying out of the way as much as possible.
The first six or so miles are pretty flat. It’s easy to forget that this will not be the case for most of the race. I simply cruise along with a contented smile on my face, incredibly happy to be here. I feel nothing more than gratitude.
I can’t believe I get to do this, I think to myself.
****
A few miles later, the flat portion of the race is effectively over and won’t return until around something like mile forty-nine. As I ascend the first few, mild climbs, I grin. So it begins.
“This will soon be a memory,” I say to myself, “faded and flawed, like the others.”
This has been one of my favorite mantras for a while now, but it will be an integral component of my mindset today in particular.
“This will soon be a memory, faded and flawed, like the others.” It’s a reminder of the temporal nature of all things. Everything, good and bad, has an end. Nothing is eternal. This race, though a daunting fifty miles, will eventually end. That is a certainty. And someday, these fifty miles will be nothing more than a fond memory of a memory of a memory, inaccurate as all memories are.
****
As I run along through the uneven single-track trails comprising most of the course, I stumble and trip many times. Each time, by some miracle, I manage to save it. And one of these saves in particular might be my greatest ever.
Somewhere in the first third of the race, I stumble over a rock or a root or some other obstruction and fall forward. My face gets about two feet from the unforgiving ground, my feet spinning at crazy high speeds to keep me from falling all the way. Road Runner from Looney Tunes comes to mind. I maintain this holding pattern for several terrifying seconds before finally managing to pull up and return to an upright posture.
“Holy shit,” I breathe in relief. I will have to be more vigilant. In about twenty miles, such a spectacular save will not be physically possible.
In addition to a lot of technical terrain, there are numerous wooden bridges that might be just as frightening as any cliffside trail I’ve ever been on. These bridges, as with most of the course, were constructed for mountain bikes. I can’t imagine riding a bike over these treacherously narrow and shaky bridges. Running on them induces quite enough adrenaline for me.
****
At aid station two, I miscalculated the distance to aid station five: the next aid station where my family will be able to meet me. In between these stations, I have the most brutal climb of the race. Had I calculated correctly, I would have made a few changes in wardrobe, footwear, and gear, but it is what it is.
I slow to a walk as it becomes clear that I’ve reached the most intense ascent of the course. I’ll need to conserve energy and spare my lungs the exertion of running in an effort to ward off a DNF. This climb is no joke. Even at a walk, my lungs are already complaining.
“We hate you,” they groan. “Why are you doing this to us?”
I get it. Their resentment is well earned. I begin to forget what a satisfying breath feels like. I knew this would come. I’d hoped it would come later in the race, but here we are. I just have to work with it as best I can.
“This is so fucked up,” says a voice from behind me. I laugh. It hurts to laugh.
“Seriously,” I reply.
One aspect of running ultras, perhaps my favorite aspect of running ultras, is the sense of camaraderie with all the other competitors. Everyone understands. Everyone feels, or, in the case of more season veterans, has felt the same pain and knows the same love for the sport. We come from different walks of life, different ideologies, different countries, even, but we all share this in common: we’re all crazy enough to put our bodies through this special kind of heaven/hell few others ever experience.
The voice behind me belongs to a guy named Dana. He and I have the opposite problem. My lungs are shot; his legs are shot. We joke about trading those qualities of our agony to even it all out and give us a fighting chance. These are, unfortunately, only jokes. We can’t actually trade anything of the sort.
Eventually, Dana passes me, wishing me good luck as he slowly creeps further and further ahead.
I need some help up this hill (hill feels like too small a word here). I grab my phone and deviate from my brother’s playlist to something more specific. I need Typhoon’s Offerings to get me through this.
This masterpiece of a concept album is a seventy-minute epic that follows a protagonist who’s losing his memories while the world around him is falling into chaos. Plus, there’s a lot of intensely intelligent imagery that forces the brain to engage: the perfect distraction. Just what the doctor ordered.
As the music begins, aiding me in my infinite trek up this sadistic ascent, I recall my first foray into trail racing: a Ragnar Relay in the Cascades.
The team I was on decided we’d be doing the ultra. We looked at the mileage and thought, “Oh, yeah. That’s super doable.” What we didn’t take into account was altitude and elevation gain.
As I trudge up this observably endless mountain, I think back to my last leg of that first Ragnar event I did a few years ago. It was seven miles long and took me about two and a half hours to complete. No matter how deep a breath I took, I could not fill my lungs with enough oxygen.
“This will soon be a memory,” I repeat, “faded and flawed, like the others.” Ragnar passed. So, too, will this. Kyle Morton’s distinctive voice reminds me of these simple facts as I get further and further into Typhoon’s album, further and further up the climb.
****
I crest the highest point of the race as the final track on Offerings begins. I check my heart rate with my watch. It’s high. Even though I’m on a downhill slope now, I opt to lower my heart rate before I resume running.
There’s a break in the music. I recognize where I am in the song and know that I have just a minute or two before the music returns.
“When it does,” I tell myself, “I’ll run until the album is done and see how I feel.”
The music fades back in and swells into an anthemic and uplifting postscript to the album.
“We were born in the shadow of a callous certainty,” Kyle Morton sings. “Since no one’s returned from behind the curtain, I guess we all just have to wait and see.”
He continues.
“We built a tall, ivory tower, tallied all our victories, but for all the noise and violent toys, our strength was in the moment when we were weak.”
I love these words. I’ve loved them since the day the album came out less than a year ago and I love them even more now as I struggle through this event.
****
The album ends and I feel it isn’t right to continue listening to anything. It’s time for a little silence. I need to let Offerings smolder for a bit longer (as tends to be the case when I listen to it, if I don’t simply hit play again immediately after finishing).
I continue pounding down the single track. I’m excited for aid station five. I’ll be meeting my family there and changing from my New Balance Minimus into my Terraventures from Topo. I’ve already worn the Minimus about five miles longer than I initially intended. My left foot and right ankle are complaining now, but my lungs feel better every step I take into this descent.
Before I get to aid station five, there’s a mini aid station. It’s not a full-fledged aid station, but any aid is better than no aid at all. As I draw ever nearer to this mini aid station, I begin seeing cardboard signs with Looney Tunes themes.
“Free hugs ahead!” says one. Others reiterate similar messages. All have beloved cartoon characters on them. One such sign with Road Runner on it reminds me of how my feet must have looked when I almost fell earlier in this run.
I reach the mini aid station. The people here are lovely. They have ice, food, refreshments, and some sodium capsules, but their encouraging spirits are the best part of this stop. Bracing myself for some bad news, I ask a question weighing upon my confidence.
“How far is it to aid station five?” I’m afraid of the answer, but I have to know. I feel more beat up with every step and all I want is a pair of fresh shoes, a change of clothes, a massage roller, and some avocado. Aid station five will bring me new life if I can just get there without dying.
The aid station volunteer thinks for a moment, mentally calculating the distance between where we are and where I want to be.
“It’s about 5K,” he tells me.
“5K!?” I exclaim. “Beautiful!”
“No one’s ever called me that before,” he replies with a self-deprecating chuckle. His good natured laugh brings further levity to the moment.
“Can I get one of those free hugs now?” I ask. He obliges. I’m almost sorry for how sweaty I am.
I gather what faculties I have left, thank the volunteers, and begin the five-kilometer stretch of trail between me and my salvation.
****
I finally arrive at aid station five. I’m in somewhat rough shape. My feet are pretty banged up from thirty-three miles of technical trail running in minimalist shoes. I’m a little dehydrated and suffering from the altitude gains.
I look from one face to another. This aid station is by far the largest I’ve encountered. There are a lot of spectators and crew present.
I don’t see my family.
When I actually reach the drop bags, supply tables, and volunteers, a woman approaches me. She’s a volunteer. She can tell I’m looking for something or someone I’m not seeing.
“What do you need?” she asks me.
“I’m looking for my crew,” I tell her. “My family has some supplies I could really use right now.”
“What do they look like? I’ll look for them while you get taken care of.”
I describe my family to the woman and she hurries off into the crowd on a mission. I go to the aid tables. I eat some banana, potato chips, and the Canadian version of an Otter Pop: a “freezie.”
The woman who approached me initially returns. My family is not with her.
“Is there a phone we can call?” she asks.
“I don’t have service,” I reply, “but if you do, I can find their numbers.”
“I have service,” she says, “Let’s go over here where we can hear better.”
She leads the way to a corner of the aid station with fewer people, away from the resounding din of numerous discordant voices. I use her phone to call my family. I almost get ahold of my dad, but the signal cuts out before we’re able to say more than a couple words to each other.
I try my mom, dad, and sister multiple times, each time with no success. I begin to realize that I might have to improvise.