Hennepin 100

Run October 5, 2019
Watermarked Photos by Mile90 Photography
Other photos by Jenny El Tee and me

It was love at first sight. Shortly before the 2018 running of the Hennepin Hundred, a picture of the finisher buckle was posted on Facebook. Most 100-mile buckles are cool in their own way, but this one was more than that. It was beautiful. I wanted one. That’s a pretty vain reason to run 100 miles, but I’ve never claimed that ultrarunning is a noble pursuit.

Adding to the appeal was the presence of a larger buckle, boldly proclaiming "sub-24" for all who get the task done in less than a day. While there’s no such thing as certainty in an ultra, running a flat 100 on a gravel path in under 24 hours is in the category of “reasonable expectations” for me. As I had just spent six months preparing for a sub-3 effort at Chicago, to be held on the same weekend as Hennepin, I had to defer love for a year. I signed up for the 2019 edition as soon as registration opened.

The original plan was to simply cover the course and collect my buckle, perhaps making some new friends along the way. However, a string of really good results (starting with Chicago) had me thinking maybe I should take a crack at my Personal Record. That was set 9 years ago on a fairly flat road course in excellent conditions. To have any chance of beating that, I'll need every advantage I can get. Specifically, I'll need a crew.

Fast food at mile 40

The difference between walking through an aid station while someone hands you exactly what you want versus having to refill bottles and pick out food from the table can save 1-2 minutes at each station. In a fast ultra like this, that’s a difference that matters. As the race falls on one of the busiest race weekends of the year, none of the locals volunteer (either that or I’ve just been more of a jackass than usual lately, but we’ll go with the first explanation). I put out a call to the Hennepin training group and find a couple pacers who are willing to pass the daytime crewing me for the first 54 miles. That’s good enough as I usually have to stop to drink broth at the nighttime stations anyway.

I arrive just before the pre-race meeting at 5PM Friday. After getting my number, I go for a quick jog on the canal path to get a read on the surface. It turns out the path is paved (albeit badly) near the finish, so I don’t get any help in deciding whether to run in trail shoes. The consensus among veterans is that road shoes are fine, so I decide I’ll go with my road shoes and leave my trail shoes at the 31-mile aid station in case the first third of the race changes my mind.

By the time I get back, my impromptu crew of Jenny and Jeremy have arrived. We sort through supplies and then grab dinner at a local brew pub. There’s a campground a few miles away, but no camping allowed at the finish. In my view, the only advantage of camping is having a place to crash right when I’m done. If I have to drive, I might as well enjoy the comfort of a real bed. After dinner, I cross the river to Iowa and spend the night at a hotel in Le Claire.

I get back to the finish well ahead of the 5AM bus departure, happily snagging a parking spot very close to the line. While technically point to point, the course is shaped more like a “T” with the stem pointing north. We’ll run south from Sterling for 32 miles, then do an out-and-back to the east getting back to the junction at 69 miles. Then the final 31 west to the finish. Since the bus is taking the direct route, the ride to the start takes less than an hour.

The race starts promptly at 7 and, after a mile of sorting, I find myself around 20 deep in the field of 500. Two hundred of those are in the 50 and I have no way of knowing how many of them are ahead, but I also don’t care. I am running this one purely for time. The goal is to be under my PR of 17 hours, 50 minutes. To do that, I’ll need to be focusing exclusively on my own progress.

After another mile or so along the north side of the Rock River, we cross on a dam and start our journey south on the actual canal. As at the far end, the path is old asphalt with chip seal. I hate to squander a fast surface, so I don’t take any walk breaks prior to aid station 1. That has me hitting the station a couple minutes ahead of my most optimistic pacing.

While I'll need to start taking walk breaks soon, I'm not worried about starting just a bit quick. However, I might be outrunning my crew. They were planning on getting to aid station 2 (the first crew accessible station) at 8:30, figuring I'd arrive about five minutes later. At current pace, I’ll cover the first 10 miles in under 90 minutes. Indeed, I roll into station 2 at 8:28 and leave just as they are getting out of the car. It’s not a big deal as the weather is cool enough that I still have a fair bit of water with me so I don’t have to refill a bottle.

The path is now a mix of dirt and gravel and I start taking my regular walk breaks. Since the aid station spacing is pretty consistently 4-6 miles, my plan is to walk out of each aid station swapping supplies with crew (where accessible) and eating and drinking. I also take another minute or two in the middle of each leg. I also take the opportunity to text my crew and tell them not to worry about the missed exchange.

At the third station, we hook up. The exchange is very efficient as we walk the whole time. I take enough that I won’t have to stop at all at the fourth station (which is not accessible to crew). The leg to 5 is only 3 miles, so I skip the midway walk break. We have another efficient exchange, though Jenny insists I take a few seconds as I’m leaving so she can get a shot of me going through the “Sharknado”. Station 6 is also closed to crew and this time I do stop to fill a bottle as the sun is out and it’s getting a bit warm.

On the way to 7, I’m caught by Tracy Kilvinger who is leading the women’s field in the 50. I’ve been running by myself pretty much the whole way, so I match her speed and we chat for a bit. The conversation is a welcome respite. With its tree-lined sides and rustic path, the canal is pleasant enough, but it looks pretty much the same the whole way. After staring at it for four hours, a distraction is welcome.

Station 7 is the junction of the T. The routing in and out is a little convoluted, so the organizers have planted lots of directional signs to keep people from missing the station or heading out on the wrong path. We arrive right at noon, which means I’m still about five minutes ahead of my best predicted pace of 9:30/mile. The early morning was ideal running conditions and, even at midday, it’s pretty nice. There’s also been quite a bit more paved trail than I was expecting and even the dirt/gravel sections are a fairly fast surface. Still, this pace definitely carries some risk. There are two choices: 1) start taking some extended walk breaks in hopes of getting some recovery or 2) go all in. It’s actually a pretty easy choice. I’ve never been able to “fix” overcooking the early part of a race. If I’ve really gone out to fast, I’m going to get clobbered tonight no matter what. Might as well see if there’s a super special result in there.

Tracy doesn’t take a walk break out of the station, so I’m back on my own. Of course, since there are no hills and hardly any turns, I can still see her even as her lead over me grows to a quarter mile. While my body is holding up just fine, I start feeling a bit depressed. It’s early for that; I usually don’t wrestle with negative thoughts until nightfall. Unlike a trail 100, I don’t really have to pay much attention to where I’m putting my feet, so I decide I can let my mind wander a bit. I start writing my race song.

I usually wait until after a race to write a song about it. Most of them are pathetically silly. The only one I’ll perform in public is the one I wrote for Leadville. But, this one starts to come together pretty quickly with a quick beat that matches my cadence. In just a few miles, I’ve got a chorus worked out and some decent rhymes for the verses. Singing it to myself buoys my spirits. The miles pass quickly and, since all the aid stations on this part of the course are crew accessible, I zip through them losing no time at all. I arrive at the 50-mile finish at 2:25PM, still a few minutes ahead of expectations.

Uh oh

We’ve actually only covered 47 miles so far. Both the 50 and 100 continue the out-and-back for a bit longer. The 50 turn comes first and I give Tracy a cheer as she passes me heading to the line for her win. The turnaround for the 100 runners is another 2 miles out and there’s a small aid station at the turn. I take my usual walk break and take a look at the sky. I’m no meteorologist, but I’ve lived in the Midwest long enough to know that when the clouds have holes in the bottoms, you might want to think about moving your picnic inside. I put my phone in a plastic bag but first use it to make a rough recording my song so I won’t forget it in the hazy miles to come.

The rain is light at first, though the distant rumbling of thunder erases any doubts that heavier stuff is coming. Back at the 50-mile finish (now 54 miles for me), I get my last exchange from Jenny and Jeremy. We stop and take a minute to check I have everything I need since anything I leave here will be unavailable for the rest of the race. We wish each other well and I am off on my own for the miles remaining.

Laura, about the time we passed.

Well, sort of. As I’m now heading back towards the junction, I’m passing lots of runners coming the other way. A few of them I know, but I exchange greetings with all of them. Laura Eriks (who will go on to run her first sub-24) gives me a hug. The rain is quite heavy now and there's a bit of a wind. It’s a bit chilly on my increasingly depleted body. I could get out my jacket, but I want to keep that dry for the night when I might really need it. I’m hoping the forecast holds and the rain clears before 6PM because I know I have a dry shirt waiting at the junction and I should get there shortly after that.

The rain does abate, but the path, which had been excellent footing in the dry is now covered in a thin layer of green ooze that is just about the slipperiest surface short of an ice rink. Fortunately, having recognized it after the first couple slips (neither resulting in a fall), it’s easy to spot and I just run in the grass when I get to a mossy section.

Between the cold rain, the slick surface, having to stop at aid stations, and just general fatigue, my trip back to the junction is about a minute per mile slower than the trip out to the turnaround. This doesn’t alarm me as I always slow down in the third quarter of a hundred. In fact, I’m quite surprised by how good I feel as I don my dry shirt and clip on my light. The PR is still very much in reach; 12-minute miles will do it. That’s not slow in the context of late-race miles at night, but it’s a lot slower than I’ve been going.

By the next aid station at 74.7 miles it’s completely dark. It’s taken over an hour to cover the nearly six miles, so my pace is still slipping. The next leg is five miles and it takes nearly an hour. I’m a bit surprised that I’m still keeping food down (I’m usually reduced to just fluids after 100K) and happily take a grilled cheese sandwich as I walk out of the station.

It’s only four miles to the aid at 83.8, but I’m finding I have to take walk breaks every 15 minutes now and the breaks are getting longer. I can feel the PR slipping away and rather than think it through clearly and collecting myself, I panic and go through the station too quickly, leaving my sugar foods (some clif blocks and a gel) on the table as I get a fresh battery out of my pockets. I haven’t been eating much sugar, mainly because it tends to come right back up at this point in the race. However, the cold has had me burning calories quicker than usual and I can feel my blood sugar levels getting low.

There’s not much I can do about that until the next aid station at 88. Once there, I shed my pack, figuring I can go with just a single bottle for the remainder of the race. I then spend a minute trying to attach it to my drop bag as best I can so it will get returned to the finish. I also shed my jacket as there’s no further chance of rain and the night air is cool, but not cold. And, I head on my way.

It’s the sort of mistake you make when you’ve been running for 15 hours. But, 100’s don’t forgive such errors. It takes two miles before I realize that I forgot to do the ONE THING that I absolutely had to do: eat some sugar. I have no food on me and, at 6.6 miles, this is one of the longest legs. I try taking walk breaks every 10 minutes to ward off the crash that will certainly come. Perhaps it helps but, at mile 92, I’m toast. My vision blurs and I’m no longer able to even walk a straight line much less run. It takes 45 minutes to stagger the remaining 2.5 miles into the aid station.

The PR is gone but, with only a bit over five miles to go, there’s really no decision to be made. I simply need to eat and hang here until my sugar levels come back and then finish the race. I collapse into a chair while a woman named Leanne who is waiting to pace another runner runs and gets me things to eat. I drink several cups of soda and also eat some gummy bears. Knowing how dangerous it is to sit too long by a fire at an aid station, I ask Leanne to make sure I get up in five minutes. I then rest my head in my hands and hope that my sugar levels will come back in that amount of time.

In five minutes, Leanne gives me a nudge and offers to run alongside me for a bit. I immediately accept the offer. We walk the first couple hundred yards as I unstiffen my legs and then break into an easy jog. A mile out, she says she has to get back to meet her runner and wishes me luck the rest of the way.

The dizziness and blurred vision is gone and I feel like I’m thinking a bit more clearly. I try to remember my song, but I keep getting it wrong. I'm glad I recorded it back at mile 55, because I seem to recall thinking it was one of my better ones. (Having re-recorded it in my basement, I still think that. granted, it's a low bar, but it's here if you want to give it a listen: WARNING, depending on your browser, this link might start playing immediately). I start to look for landmarks from yesterday’s reconnaissance run, but I’m still too far out for that. With about three miles to go, I spot a headlamp ahead. I’ve been catching 50K walkers all night as that distance started from the junction an hour before I came through. However, this runner seems to be moving too well to be a 7-hour 50K’er. If I’m just seeing them now, I must be gaining. It’s time to see if there’s anything left. This is a race, after all.

The increase in pace is remarkably painless. I can feel the effort, of course, but that’s all it is: effort. None of the agony that usually goes with a race gone bad. I start to realize that this race never went bad. The legs were always there, my pacing was aggressive but not overly so. I just missed refueling at a really bad time. I’m now recognizing the trail from yesterday; there’s less than fifteen minutes to go. I catch and pass the runner just before we go under the interstate which is a mile from the finish. I continue to press all the way to the line crossing in 18:17:59. I’m officially fifth overall, first “master” (master has become a somewhat ambiguous term; it used to mean 40+ but here, as with several other races I’ve done lately, it means 50+).


In contrast with the monolithic path just completed, the finish area has so many options, it’s hard to decide what to do first. There’s hot food in the pavilion, showers and cots at the firehouse, clean clothes in my car, and PEOPLE. One of the best parts of finishing an ultra is the feeling of rejoining a community. You perceive it on the course, where aid is freely given and received from strangers simply because that's what the task requires. But, at the finish, you wrap yourself in it. It is the warm joy of being with those who understand that to be truly full one must first be truly empty. It really is so much more than a buckle. But, I still love that buckle.