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| Ned and me |
In the screaming silence
I try to lose myself
There is no hiding place
No hiding place
Alert, long-time readers know that every August, I travel to
nearby Pittsfield, MA, to participate in the Sweltering Summer 8-Hour Ultra.
This race is held on a 0.3553-mile dirt “track” (it’s not really a track, just
an odd-shaped dirt path) at Clapp Park in Pittsfield.
Through random doggedness – I have remained alive and ambulatory,
my car has not broken down on the way to the Berkshires and I’m stubborn enough
to sign up every year – I remain one of only two people to have participated in
all 13 Swelterings (fun fact: the first year, it was a 6-hour, before race
director and good pal Benn Griffin changed it to the current 8-hour format in 2014).
Because of the aforementioned, random doggedness, I also
happen to be the cumulative laps/mile leader – although that lead diminishes
each year with the dogged (and faster) pursuit of fellow Clappster Bill
Odendahl.
Benn keeps track of the overall laps and mileage. Entering
2025, I was 111 laps (39.3 miles) away from the 500-mile medallion/coin. Based
on my “training’’ (really, I should call it “activity”), I knew achieving this would be a
big push.
For the past year (maybe more), my activities have consisted
of 70 percent walking and 30 percent running/jogging. The walking is not a stroll
but not particularly brisk either – about 3.5 miles per hour. The runs are
whatever I can handle with my loyal running partners/friends – usually 5-7
miles at roughly 9:00-9:30 pace. I generally do something every day, logging
more walking mileage in the summer, when I have a bit more time.
I’m neither proud nor ashamed of my activity level. It is
what it is. The calculus that I had to face, entering Saturday’s ultra, was
this: Would this level of training allow me to cover nearly 40 miles on a warm
summer day on a dusty dirt path with virtually no shade? Is this even possible?
I tried. Lord knows, I tried. At the four-hour mark, I was
ahead of pace, with 61 laps logged. But I was pushing it hard. I was mostly
running, with a few walking spells, and always staying on the track. Under the
beating sun, as morning turned to midday turned to afternoon.
That 70 walk/30 jog ratio from my daily activity log? I was
blowing that out of the water, more like 80 jog/20 walk. Soon, I would come to
realize, this was a grave mistake and a severe miscalculation on my part. A
post-race analysis of my splits – and, more importantly, my alarmingly high heart rate – told the story of a kamikaze mission.
During the middle stages of the race, I would play games in
my head. “OK. Let’s push this mile, comfortably hard, and then walk for half a
lap.” I would push the mile, breathing heavy, not all out but pretty damn hard.
My wrist would buzz and I’d look at my watch. “10:34. F**k. That’s as fast as I
can go?!?!”
And then I did the math. And I got scared.
Somewhere around this time, the song “Painted Silver Light”
by Gov’t Mule (my favorite band) came into my earbuds. I had never really
listened to the lyrics of this bluesy song. As I was sweating and squinting in
the midday sun, desperately trying to figure out how to hang on and get to around
40 miles, I heard these lyrics:
In the screaming silence
I try to lose myself
There is no hiding place
No hiding place
And I thought: Yeah. That’s perfect. That’s about right.
And then? It started to fall apart. My relatively max effort
elicited slower and slower running miles, until the running miles became
run/walk and then walk. And then, with about 80 minutes to go, I realized I had
zero chance of getting that 500-mile coin this year.
And so, I did what comes most naturally to me these days. I
walked.
But something strangely terrible happened as I walked around
the track. It felt just as hard as my hardest running pace. I was really
struggling, even just at my normal 3.5-mph. I tried to have a conversation with
an old college friend who stopped by, and I was soon out of breath, and getting
a little dizzy.
People noticed. Byron Lane, a fantastic ultra guy who I’ve
known for years, said: “Pete, you don’t look good, you should go sit in the shade.”
About five minutes later, I knew he was correct.
I stumbled into a port-o-potty, sweaty and shivering, and …
well, it was not pretty, on both ends of the digestive spectrum, let’s just say
that. I stumbled through one final lap – 101 laps, 10 shy of the goal, with
only 5 minutes of the 8 hours remaining, so I had used up as much time and
energy as humanly possible. And then, finally, I sat. I sat in the shade. For a
really long time.
For about an hour, every time I went to stand up, waves of nausea
overcame me. Eventually, I recovered. A few hours later, I got my appetite
back, devoured some pizza and eventually some ice cream, showered and went to
bed.
Good friend Ned Kenyon and his wife Eva took good care of me
during that post-race haze in the shade. Ned is a proud Forever Fox (note his old-school Alumni Racing Team singlet), now proudly retired from the NYPD. He is an ultra guy, and he covered
more than 40 miles on this day – his longest distance ever. Ned did great!
As he helped load stuff back into the car, Ned said, “yeah
Pete, I’m not coming back here next year.”
Ned’s a trail ultra guy and the relentless repetitiveness of
the perpetually sunny Clapp laps got to him. Hell, it got to ALL of us on
Saturday. I love Ned like a son and a brother combined, and his and Eva’s
reflexive care for the old coach will not soon be forgotten.
God willing, I’ll be back in Pittsfield next summer. Why
not? Where else would I be! My approach will be different and will more closely
align with my activity level. There will be a lot more walking and a lot less
running and no vision of 40 miles or anything close to that. To run 40 miles,
you have to be a runner in training, and I’m only that for a small fraction of
the time.
So, that’s that. One final race report until I go into hibernation
for another year. Thanks for following along!
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