The G Running Diary

JJ 100, Part 2: The Dawning: 11/11/03

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I packed a lot of warm clothes because I thought it would be cold at night. Early morning Saturday would help me gauge the temperature for early morning Sunday. Well, it wasn't cold at all really. I started the race in shorts and a long sleeve top. The start reminded me of my first 100 miler, Arkansas Traveller. As everyone sort of ambled over to where the start was, somehow it was already started. And everyone was heading up the trail. All 160 or so of us. That sounded like a lot of runners to fit on a 15-mile loop trail. And, we would all get to keep seeing each other because as soon as you finished one loop, you had to go right back out the way you came and do the loop in reverse. This meant I could play a mental game. Instead of thinking of it as 6 loops, it was just 3 out-and-backs. Except at the end of the out, there was the same aid station and group of people as where you started. Boy, maybe it would get weird at night.

Someone once asked me what I think about when I run. I think about a lot of stuff, but I realized in the early part of this run, I like to entertain myself with bad math. I made weird calculations based on segments of the run and miles per hour, and then tried to translate it to minutes per mile. Then I did the math backwards to check my work. I often did it wrong. But here's what I thought. If you do a 15 mile loop in 3:30, an out-and-back is 7 hours, and 3 of those is 21 hours. Then you have 3 hours left to do the last short loop, which is 9 miles. That gives you your sub-24 finish. So as I was thinking all this and then adjusting the numbers for 26 and 28 hour finishes, I was running in probably the last third of the pack. I finished the first loop and turned around and started telling other runners, "We are all on 24 hour pace." It was true. My first loop was somewhere around 3:20, and people after me weren't that far back. Basically everyone had gone out too fast. Probably me too.

So, back out to do the second loop. I was maintaining a good pace, thinking I would maybe be done with that loop in 6:30--a good 50K time. I started talking with Shannon. She said she just wanted to finish and wasn't well trained for this race. I reminded her what time it was and where we were. Just wanting to finish. We talked about Badwater, running plans, and just as we talked about endurance rides and Shannon's horse, some horses appeared on the trail. We were happy to say hi to the riders, and they were polite about letting us pass. After we went through the aid station at 25 miles, Shannon paused ahead of me to talk with a runner who seemed to be having some trouble. I heard him saying something about salt. I stopped to walk with him. I felt like walking anyway. So we talked. I wondered which salt he was taking. Succeed! Caps have 341 mg sodium. Endurolytes have 100 mg of sodium chloride, which means only 40 mg of sodium. I just found this recently on the nutritional information. He was taking Endurolytes. I gave him a Succeed! and told him to take more at the aid stations. It turned out that everyone had that idea--the aid stations ran out of the Succeed! Caps. I thought it was great that they had any at all. After talking for a while, I realized that this guy, Rick, was the same person who had rode with Don and me in our van from Stovepipe Wells to the start of Badwater. We started running again. Rick had perked up. After another walking break, I continued running. I was having fun. I felt better after walking and felt like I was bounding through the rocks and into the start/finish aid station.