TIN FOIL HATS

     Ok, I admit it. When I went to crew for Jim in Leadville for the 100 I expected to see a bunch of skeletal, grinning weirdos in tin-foil hats communing with their home planets as they rattled their boney ankles over the rocks.  It really wasn't like that. Oh sure, there were some obviously disturbed types that you wouldn't look you straight in the eye on the subway but there were relatively few of them--probably no more than in any crowd.

     What I saw was a group of seemingly normal people who just happened to be facinated with the idea of trying to run 100 miles. Now, by "normal" I don't mean the kind of normal you see in a crowd of random people at the mall and certainly not at the Indiana State Fair, where the big hit this year (I am not making this up) was fried butter. I mean normal in the sense that they probably have relatively sane day-to-day lives that include friends and families.

     In fact, most of them had friends and/or family members there to crew for them. As far as body types go, they weren't all gristly Mick Jagger-Madonna clones. There were a few of those, sure, but just about all types, except for the truely overweight, were represented. There were some pretty beefy guys and more than a few kinda fleshy people. In fact, being fleshy didn't necessarily seem to be a big drawback. There is some scientific support for the proposition that after your body burns through all the glycogen it can store, it switches over to fat burning for energy. This is not to say that being fat is a good thing--it's not. But we all have some body fat, even Jagger if you look hard enough and, as it turns out, science says a little body fat is a good thing in an ultra marathon.

     Women make the transition to burning fat more efficiently than men, which probably accounts for the number of women who seemed to be doing really well at Leadville.  Also, most of them seemed to have dialed in their mental approach to the challenge of the race. They were so smooth and serene. While a lot of the guys, especially the younger ones, would come charging into the aid stations and bark at their crews, "Gimmie my Power Bars", "Where are my special socks?",  the women would tend to glide in smiling and their mostly female crews would hug them and say things in pleasant voices like "Oh, Sweetie, you're doing so well". The best runners seemed to have a kind of zen thing going and the best crews just seemed to know that psychological support is as important as groceries.

     One thing they stressed at the pre-race meeting is that you can keep going long after you think you can't. So far, the hardest training I've done is a hilly 15 on one day and 30 the next. I did notice that even though it was profoundly uncomfortable toward the end of the 30, it was, in fact, possible to keep going. What they didn't mention at the pre-race meeting, however, is that the realization that you can, indeed, keep going does nothing to lessen the really irritating, pervasive discomfort.

     Oh well, nobody's making us do this and it is kind of interesting to search for that zen-like serenity that the women showed at Leadville. Maybe I need to get in touch with my feminine side. Like Yogi said, "90% of the whole thing is mental and so is the other half."