For me personally, this race was a disaster. It was the first time that I have failed to complete a race, and while I accepted long ago that inevitably I would get a DNF at some point, I am still very frustrated that it happened.
Having completed this race last year, I felt very confident going into it this year. In fact, I was hoping to finish in under 24 hours, which would mean cutting over 4 hours off of last year’s time.
I began to have doubts about finishing in 24 hours once I saw the course. It rained most of the week leading into the race, which meant that the course was a muddy, soggy, mess. I’m sure that the adventure racers among the participants felt right at home. It was nasty, and it was clearly going to make the race more difficult, but I was determined not to let it stop me. The mud and the swampy areas might slow me down, but if I didn’t like a challenge I would never have signed up for this race in the first place.
The real trouble started for me the night before the race. I had a heck of a time getting to sleep. I just felt unsettled. I wrote it off as nerves, and while going into a long race already lacking sleep is far from ideal, it still seemed like more of an annoyance than anything else.
Then came the morning of the race. I couldn’t eat. Every piece of solid food that I tried to eat was rejected by my body. This worried me, but again I wrote it off as nerves. I figured that if I ate more during the race to make up for it, then I would be okay.
To be honest, at this point I was deluding myself. I had felt a little off for a couple days before the race, but I didn’t feel ill or injured, so I ignored it. Then I dismissed all of the signs of illness as nerves. That changed pretty quickly once I actually started running. It is not unusual for my stomach to be unsettled before a race, but that feeling goes away once I start running. Not this time.
I was less than 10Km into the race before I knew that something was really wrong. I felt far more tired than I should have, even considering my trouble sleeping, and my stomach was getting worse, not better. There were several times when I thought that I might have to stop and throw up. I could no longer avoid the obvious: there was no way I was going to be able to finish the race, and continuing to run was only going to make me more ill. Still, my ego demanded that I accomplish something, so I set my sights on finishing the lap at the target pace I had set when I was planning to finish in 24 hours. I did accomplish this, and then I had to swallow my pride and tell the race officials that I was dropping out. That was difficult, but even more difficult was telling my wife and friends who had taken an entire weekend to come out and support me.
The race officials started to try to talk me out of dropping out until I explained what my reasons were, and then they were very understanding. My family and friends know that I would have run the race on a broken leg if I thought that I still had a chance of finishing, so when I said that I couldn’t continue, they simply accepted it. Once my stomach had settled a bit, I went back to bed and slept for 13 hours. It is now two weeks later, and I am finally getting over my illness.
After I dropped out, the weather conditions went from being a cold in the morning, to hot and humid in the afternoon, and then back to cold with periods of heavy rain at night, which made it hard to feel too bad about not being out running. Yet I did feel bad. The racers that finished can take pride in having finished a hard race in lousy conditions and being generally badass, and I missed out on that. However, frustration can be an effective motivator, and I will be back next year for the 20th running of the race in order to complete my goal of finishing in under 24 hours.
The race officials and aid station volunteers were awesome as always. Despite the conditions, the trail was well marked and the aid stations were well stocked. I can only imagine how unpleasant it must have been for the people manning the aid stations during the night. They all deserve a great deal of respect and gratitude.
