Can't We Buy Success?

* * * * * * TECHNOLOGY REPORT * * * * * *

Since Cory hasn't filed his technology report, I'll fill in as best I can.

There's this stuff, see. And you buy it, see. And the more of this stuff you buy, the better you do. And if you run out of stuff to buy, well, you just aren't looking hard enough.

END OF TECHNOLOGY REPORT

I'm not anti-technology, by the way. Why, if it wasn't for technology, my vocabulary of swear words would be far smaller. And I have no criticism of anyone who tries to buy his way to a successful finish of the Leadville 100 mile run. Not even someone, who might answer to the name of, say, Cory Brundage, who buys an altitude tent to enclose his bed. Think Michael Jackson, but not as normal. But since my running partner has chosen to do this, I fully respect his demented decision.

As for me, I refuse to venture into the arena of purchased performance-enhancement.

[Go ahead. You know you want to. Insert your own ED drug punch line here]

Instead, I rely on the one thing that's at the core of everything I've ever accomplished: a sneaky dishonesty and lack of scruples. I'm willing to do anything--even, despite how much it sickens me, be nice--if it will trick others to do my work for me.

In this case, my claim-credit-for-the-work-of-others strategy has two prongs to it. First is the "crew" prong. On an overnight race like Leadville, the crew members are the ones who do the hardest work. I'm not talking about staying up all night. I'm not talking about standing around for hours in 35 degree weather with flashlights as the only source of warmth. I'm not talking about driving like crazy down unmarked dirt roads in the middle of the night, not knowing for sure if you're even going in the right direction, all the while having to dodge other crews driving like crazy in the opposite direction. All of those things happen, and all of those things are extremely demanding. But they are all a Club Med vacation compared to . . .

DEALING WITH THE RUNNER!!!

I'm sure there are some long distance runners who are nice people. Some who help old people across the street and mentor children at the local elementary school. Some who teach Sunday School and pick up litter on the weekends. But at 18 hours into Leadville, when it's pitch dark, getting cold, and there's still 35 miles to go, there are NO nice runners. And when you've got two grumpy personalities to start off with--say, Cory and me--it's obvious to all concerned that it would be more fun to go quail hunting with Dick Cheney than to crew for a couple of sour ingrates like us. And yet the crews stick with it.

Here is a typical exchange between a runner and his crew in the later stages of the race:

RUNNER (first words upon arriving at the aid station): "Where the fuck is the stuff?!"

CREW: "What stuff?"

RUNNER: "Goddamit! I'm losing time! You all are fucking worthless."

CREW: "Here's everything you told us to bring. [holding out about 40 pounds of stuff that they have lugged by hand 2 miles from where they had to leave the car] Do you need something else?"

RUNNER: "Shit, fuck, space carrots." (grabs a jacket that a crew member is wearing, not noticing his own jacket that is tied around his waist) [runs off]

In other words, here's a picture of the Perfect Crew:



Our crew is Cory's son, Ben. When you consider that Ben has known Cory all of Ben's life, and he's still willing to crew for us?! That is truly incredible.



The second prong to my plan of letting others carry me to success is the "pacer." Now, contrary to the name, the pacer at a race like Leadville doesn't really have much to do with setting the pace for the runner. You can only have a pacer after the first 50 miles, so Ma Nature has a lot more to say about the runner's pace over the second 50 than any human. But what the pacer does do is threefold. First, he or she carries your shit.


That doesn't sound like much if you are picturing a normal sort of running race, such as a 5 miler. But at Leadville, you pick up your pacer with typically 15 hours of the race still ahead of you. So, think what you do in a normal 15-hour period. THAT is what I mean by carrying your shit: you're going to need food; you're going to need lots of water; you're going to need a jacket, a hat, gloves, a head lamp or flashlight, tights; you're going to need toilet paper; you're going to need a newspaper or magazine to read while you're doing your "business"; and, of course, you're going to need a battery-powered boom box playing the theme from "Chariots of Fire". So if you have a really strong pacer who will carry everything for you, your chances of getting to the finish line in time go up dramatically.


The second thing the pacer does for you is that he or she functions as your brain. Because that gray mass inside your skull is just excess baggage for the second half of the race. Now, I have an advantage here, because that describes my brain at any place or time, but for most people, they go from smart to really stupid over the course of the race. The pacer has to tell the runner to drink fluids, to eat nutrition, to put on clothes, to take off clothes, to run, to stop running, not to worry about the three-eyed, five-legged giant Chia pets that the runner is hallucinating about. And these things have to be repeated for hour after hour. Seriously. Imagine a newborn's total dependence, but a teenager's ability to harm to oneself. That's the pacer's problem.


And the third thing the pacer has to do is to keep the runner moving forward when all the runner wants to do is stop. You can expect the runner to resort to whining, name calling, and outright lying. "I'll just sit down for 10 minutes; then I'll be all set to continue." "I've just discovered a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem! I'll just stretch out on this cot while you go get some paper so that I can write it down." "I just heard the call of a pack of carnivorous deer up ahead. We'd better not leave this aid station." I've never been a pacer for a 100-mile race, so I'm not sure what the best tactics are for the pacer to overcome this behavior. But I'm pretty sure a bullwhip is involved.




So, to sum up, the perfect pacer would be the combination of (1) a pack mule; (2) a sadist; and (3) a student of Sigmund Freud. Unfortunately, all of the people I have found with that skill set are busy auditioning for the next "Survivor" episode.


Still, a very nice person whom we met at the Leadville Training Camp who lives in Colorado has been recruiting pacers for us. An extremely nice person. A LIVING SAINT. (In case she's reading this blog.) She has found 3 people who don't know us who are interested in being our pacers. Yeah, I know. Once I say that they are willing to be our pacers, you immediately knew that that don't know me and Cory. Thanks.




So we've got a crew and pacers. And weird tents and titanium hiking poles and cooling sleeves for our arms and pseudo-snakeskin gaiters for our ankles and vitamin tablets that Barry Bonds envies. I think we're out of excuses.

Leadville Training Camp

Maybe you've heard that this was a very wet, snowy year in the Rockies? Turns out, those rumors are true. Turns out that the number one thing I took away from the Leadville 100 Training Camp was the meaning of the word "glissade." The meaning, based on the way it was used in reference to me, is when a guy loses his footing while trying to walk across a snow field and ends up sliding downhill on his butt until his descent is stopped by hitting a patch of bare rocks. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, "If it weren't for the honor of being complemented on my excellent glissade, I would have rather walked uninterrupted across the snow field."

My little snow-slide adventure didn't happen until the fifth day we were out in Colorado. Cory and I went out a few days early to start to acclimate to the altitude, and as a favor to all the people that were trying to improve the image of Indianapolis.

Our first full day out there, we walked and ran around Lake Turquoise and back. Yeah, I know. That doesn't mean anything to you. Just say, "ooh, aah, cool." It actually was all those things. The route is all trails around a 7-mile-long man-made recreational lake at 10,000 feet among the pines. It was slow, but it went better than we had expected, so we bit off a bigger chunk for the next day--going up the "Power Line", a 1400 foot climb over 2.5 miles, then another 10 miles of a mixture of trail and road. We also recruited another sucker, oops, I mean, runner to do the workout with us--a runner from San Diego who had also come out to Leadville early to acclimate.

Well, things went well on the way up. And by "well", I mean, better than what was to follow, because we first had to go through a pond about 100 yards across that normally doesn't exist but has been formed by runoff from the excessive amounts of snow. Then we realized that someone had forgotten her car keys, which we needed because we were running from my car to her car and then going to drive back. It would be wrong to point the finger at someone for making such a common mistake, so I won't. I'll only say that it was one of the people in this picture:

The solution to the forgotten car keys? Send someone back through the arctic pond to retrieve the keys. But who should we send? By a vote of two-to-one, the decision was made that the tallest person would be least inconvenienced by freezing his lower extremities. Yes, that would be me.

After those difficulties were surmounted, we were only left with the 1400 foot climb, in thin air and a bright sun. And that was going to turn out to be the easy part of the workout.

You see, once we got over Sugarloaf Pass at 11,200 feet (at which point I did not sing "Green Eyed Lady"--and if you understand what I'm referring to, then shame on you! You clearly spent your youth listening to the radio instead of doing your homework), you would have thought that everything would get easy. A nice long downhill in the shade.

Which would make sense except in this case, "in the shade" meant "where the snow hasn't melted yet." We hit an 8-foot pile of snow right away. We tried to circle around through the woods to meet back up with the trail. Instead we kept running into big piles of snow. This went on for 40 minutes as we kept working our way down the mountain but not making any progress at getting back to the trail, by which time one unnamed member of the party became very concerned that we were about to become chew toys for wild bears. I felt confident that there was little risk of that--we were near the Colorado Trail where there are large numbers of hikers and, hence, very few big animals. The bigger risk, in keeping with Colorado traditions, was a Donner-Party-type human sacrifice when we ran out of food, but I decided that it might not be all that calming to point that out to the concerned member of our group, especially since she was the smallest one in the group.

Anyway, everything turned out fine. Well, fine for Cory and me. And by the time those bones are found, no one will remember we were ever there.

The next day, Friday, we did a 5 mile run and otherwise rested up for the start of official Training Camp. Official training camp began on Saturday with breakfast and a 26 mile run. I did really well at one of the two. It wasn't the run. Cory and I did okay, I guess, but the distance and the altitude made us whimper like the big babies we really are. The main good thing about the run, other than the breakfast, was after the run on the bus back to Leadville we discovered that we weren't the most despicable, soulless people at the training camp. (Well, I knew I wasn't, but as for Cory, who's still a practicing lawyer, well, . . .) It turns out that one of the other runners was not only a lawyer, but a lawyer for ExxonMobil. Talk about your moral black hole, where no glimmer of conscience can ever escape! When Cory stood next to her, he literally glowed with virtue! Strangest damn thing I ever saw.

The next two days were more of the same--having our egos handed back to us after being pummeled into puddles of goop by altitude, heat, distance and reality. We eventually got the message--we need to buy more shoes, more clothing, more gear, and more drugs. (Or we could train better. Nah, that sounds too much like work.) I'll leave it to Cory, who is now our technology guru, to fill you in on our once and future acquisitions.

Comrades Marathon Experience--(not a race report)

     It's been almost a month now since the Comrades Marathon and Jim and I are in Colorado, at the Training Camp for the Leadville 100 Trail Run which takes place on August 20th, so a detailed report on Comrades is overdue.  I think the purpose of blogs like this is to share information that may be useful to anyone considering whether to do a particular race. I will do that a bit here but, before going into the details, let me just skip to the bottom line and say that this race was a wonderful experience and, if you are considering it, you should do it. It is not without some hassles but those all have to do with getting there. Once you're there, it's a pleasurable and rewarding experience. I'd go back and do it again without a second thought. Jim will get into the actual race reporting in his next post. What follows is not so much about the running of the race as it is about the experience of being there.

     GETTING THERE

     You may live in a part of the world blessed with good flight connections to the rest of the planet. Those of us from Indiana, however, live with the adage that "You can't get there from here---at least not easily".

     It took us four different flights and something like 28 hours to get to Durban. After all the cramped, uncomfortable, low-level abuse that is modern day economy class travel we were finally on the approach to landing in Durban.  We descended to a level where we could count the palm trees but then stayed there for an extremely long time while we seemed to be circling. Suddenly, the pilot pulled it up in a steep climb and  flew in a direction I was pretty sure was away from the airport because we seemed to be headed well out over the Indiana Ocean. He then came on the intercom with his best Chuck Yeager tone (tinged with a South African accent) and said that the "folks on the ground have waived us off because of an improper vector" but he was pretty sure they'd get it right on the next approach. By that time, after having been stuck in flying metal tubes for going on the second day, my feeling was that I didn't care whether he landed it or crashed it, just as long as we got off the God-damned plane. He nailed it the second time and we got off and picked up our rental car which, because they drive on the left side of the road, has the steering wheel on the right side and you shift gears with your left hand. After spending eternity in sleep deprived travel hell, it seemed to make perfect sense and we took off for Pietermaritzburg.

     BEING THERE

     Comrades is run every year between the big city of Durban (on the Indiana Ocean and very modern--think Miami Beach) and Pietermaritzburg, a less big city of 1/2 million or so that really seems much, much smaller than that.  Every year they run it in the opposite direction from the year before. This year was an "up" year meaning it started in Durban and was up hill all the way from sea level to Pietermaritzburg, elevation roughly 2000 feet. If that entire elevation gain was a constant grade spread out over the whole 87 kilometer distance (54 miles) it might not be so bad. Of course, it isn't. As we shall see in Jim's post, there are are more hills than you can count which present both steep up-hills and long descents; but more about that later. For now the important thing to convey is how good a time we had in Pietemaritzberg.

      The race organizers operate out of Comrades House, which is an old,  red brick victorian home in a quiet neighborhood.  They couldn't have been nicer or more helpful to a couple of jet-lagged bumbling American flakes who seemed to have forgotten to bring all the things you are supposed to have at registration. We met numerous people who have run the race mutiple times, some as many as 18 or more.  They were extremely patient and answered all our dumb questions and gave us good tips and were just generally a lot of fun. They were genuinely glad to have international runners come and try their race, which this year had about 13,000 starters (and a little over 11,000 finishers--accurate statistics would be on the race web site).

     One of the things we came to appreciate from talking with the Comrades organizers, runners, and volunteers is how different the running culture there is compared to back in Indy. There the prospect of running 54 to 56 miles every year is considered absolutely unremarkable. It's just something you do. In Indy the big running event is the 500 Mini-Marathon, a half marathon run in conjunction with the Indianapolis 500 that is now drawing 35 to 40,000 entrants every year. The thought for most people is "Boy, if I could only get in good enough shape to do the Mini I will have really accomplished something" and maybe that's true. I'm not denigrating it. Everything is relative. In South Africa, however, it's not  "Boy, if I could only get in shape to do Comrades" it's "I really want to keep my string of 15 finishes going so I'd better do three or four marathons to sharpen up."

     The way they go about it is also different. They seem to have a "we're all in this togather" attitude. It was, after all, called Comrades  by the original organizer to honor his buddies who fell in combat in WWI.  That would be this guy, Vic Clapham:

                                                           

     When a person has completed nine Comrades they are given a yellow number. When they've completed ten they are given a green number which is theirs for all time. At a point about half way though the race we were handed a single long-stem red rose by some volunteers. I had no idea why. About a quarter mile up the road we came upon a wall lining the course. On the individual stones were memorials to previous runners who have died. Each little plaque had their name and number. Yellow ones for runners with fewer than ten finishes, green ones for the ones over ten. We saw that the locals were going over and putting their roses on the wall beneith the individual plaques. Clearly this race was so important to these people and their families that they wanted to continue to be part of it even after they were gone.

The South African runners are organized into running clubs and they support each other during the race. Even among runners from different clubs (or races, for that matter) the attitude was that they weren't racing each other--just the clock. The cut-off time is 12 hours. Finish after that and it's no metal for you. If you're under 11 hours you get a different and more highly prized metal. Under 9 and it's better yet. And so on. To help each other make their respective goals, groups of runners will organize into "busses". A twelve hour buss is a group of people who plan to finish under twelve hours. They will run togather the whole way, sometimes chanting in unison or singing and just basically helping pull each other along.

     The race just has a old-school patina to it. Even though it is a national facination like our Super Bowl (they show the whole 12+ hours on national television live) it has none of the glitz and smaltz of other sporting events. The finishers' medals are just that--old fashioned medals, not the enormous pie plates other races give out for walking a 5 K. Here's a comparison of the Indy Mini-Marathon medal and the Comrades medal:

                                          The Comrades medal looks like something a soldier
                                           brought back from the war.
                                          The Mini medal looks like something you'd
                                          get for regular attendance at a whore house.
                                                                                                                    


     We met people from several running clubs. Jim and I stayed in Pietermartizburg which presented a logistical problem. Since the race started in Durban at 5:30 am we either had to get there in the morning before the start or go there the night before and get a hotel room for one night. If we drove down to Durban the night before the race we'd be running away from our car and need to go back to Durban to get it after the race when we assumed we'd be practically dead. An alternative was to take the bus provided by the organizers down to Durban the morning of the race. This was not appealing because the bus was leaving at something like 3:30 am, which would mean getting up a 2:00 or so, which meant never really getting any sleep.  We decided to get a room in Durban and find a way to get there the day before the race. Easier said than done. Surprisingly there were no Greyhound or "big bus" connections that would work.

     We had seen numerous mini-buses all over the streets of Pietermaritzburg that seemed to have no official stops but would pull over anywhere and any time to pick up anybody. There seemed to be two employees on every bus. One to drive and one to lean out the window and yell at people who weren't showing enough interest in getting on their bus. The passengers who were on the buses, which always seemed packed to over-flowing, appeared to have all their worldly possessions piled on their laps. We found out that some of these mini-buses made the trip to Durban and asked around at Comrades House if taking one of those would be a good idea. The several volunteers standing around sort of shot glances at each other and one finally said "Well, you'd have a real South African experience", which we did not take as a glowing recommendation.
     Eventally, one of the organizers, Ileen Hall, said "Why don't you come to my running club's pasta dinner tonight and see if you can catch a ride with someone to Durban?" She told us to look for her husband, John Hall, at the Natal Carbineers Drill Hall. We went and found ourselves at the club house of the Natal Carbineers of 1879, who participated in the invasion of the Zululand, during which 23 of their members died, and numerous subsequent battles. Needless to say the place was extremely cool. It was also extremely packed with hungry runners from all over Africa, black and white. There was a pitch-in spread with every kind of pasta dish you can imagine and all you could carry. It wasn't hard to spot John Hall. Every few minutes he would make an announcement in a booming voice and remind the Carbineers to look for each other during the race--which would be easy because they all wore knee high red socks. We quietly went up to him and asked if he knew of anybody driving down to Durban the night before the race and he said "So, you're the Yanks. My wife said you'd be here." He immediately shouted the noise down and yelled "We've got a couple of Americans here who need a ride to Durban". Looking at Jim he said "Is anybody driving down who can give a big seat to this fellow?" And then,  looking at me, he added "And a not so big one for this one?".
     A tall African man named John stood up and said he was the head of their club and if we could meet them early in the morning there was room on their bus. Perfect. We met them and talked with him the whole way to Durban.  He was 52 and about to do his 22nd Comrades. He explained that most people he knew didn't like America too much but they liked Americans and we seemed alright to him. He asked what we thought of Obama and gave no hint of how he felt until we answered. He then agreed with us that Obama is a good man doing the best he can.
     We got to Durban bright and early, with a day to kill, and wished him and his team good luck. As it turned out, we saw him several times during the race as we passed him or he passed us and he was always smiling and talking to everyone around him and apparently having the time of his life. Nice guy.