When I signed up for the Booneville Backroads 100, held just outside Des Moines Iowa, I was thinking this could be a really good race for me. Well, it's not the first time I've been wrong.
The course at Booneville is anything but flat. Almost every mile contains some sort of small hill. But, they are fairly small and the total elevation gain is only around 6,000 feet, which isn't high, even by Midwest standards (GPS watches, which always overstate such things claim more like 7500 but I'm going with what the contour map says). The grades are steep enough that walking them isn't just a viable strategy, it's pretty much the only strategy. The surface is almost entirely gravel road. If this all sounds like a Gravel Grinder, you're not wrong. The route is just the sort of thing the gravel bike crowd seeks out.
My reference point for this race is the Heartland 100, which has a similar profile and is also held on gravel (sharing many roads with the famed Dirty Kanza gravel grinder). As I finished Heartland in just over 20 hours, that seems like a reasonable expectation for this one as well. Except for one problem: this has been a dreadful year for my running.
A stress fracture in the spring masked a larger issue with my heart that wasn't actually corrected by surgery until 10 days before Booneville. During the preceding months, I had been able to run slowly for a long time (even completing the Silver Rush 50 in Leadville), but would completely shut down the minute I tried running at even my normal training pace. While the surgery is successful at getting my heart back online, I'm not cleared to run again until the week of the race. The cardiologist doesn't think there's any real danger in running it but states the obvious: I probably won't do as well as I normally would.
Undaunted, I head off to Iowa. For some reason, Google routes me through a bunch of little towns rather than just taking the 4-lane highway across the state. Passing through Eldon, I spot a little sign simply stating, "American Gothic House". Really? Well, I guess it had to be painted somewhere and the middle of Iowa is a pretty believable spot for that somewhere to be. These random roadside finds are a favorite for me and I happily add 10 minutes to my trip to see what is probably the world's most famous farmhouse. The stoic couple have long since passed, but the visitor center has costumes and props if you want to try to recreate the work with your own image. I defer to Grant Wood's judgement and make no attempt to improve on his masterpiece.
I wake at 3AM and complete the short drive to the start by 4:30, half an hour before the gun. The morning is cool for early September (70F) but the dew point is only a couple degrees behind, leaving a heavy dampness over everything. As usual for ultras, I don't bother warming up. Much less usual, I am wearing a watch. The course is not marked and, while I have a map and cue sheets, it's pretty easy to blow by a turn in the latter stages of a 100, so I want to have mileage hacks to work from. My own GPS watch is only good for about 3 hours, so I borrowed one that can go the distance from Matt Corriel.
The 100-mile and 100-kilometer fields start together as each will follow the same big loop around Madison County, returning to the start/finish at 62 miles. The 100-milers will then go back out the same way, but shortcut the loop to finish their distance. The combined field is nearly 100 runners but spreads out quickly with me about a quarter of the way deep.
The opening few miles provide enough hills to vindicate my general strategy of walking the hills and running everything else. At an easy jog and assertive walk, I'm able to cover each of the 10 miles to the first aid station in less than 12 minutes (20-hour pace). There's no porta-potty at the aid station and my current needs are more than "pee behind a tree". I come prepared for such situations, but it makes the stop a few minutes longer than I'd like. As I drop my headlamp and reflective vest into my drop bag, I note that my jersey is completely soaked through. It may not feel hot, but I'm obviously going through a lot of fluids.
The subsequent 11 miles to the next aid station contain two of the larger hills on the course, but I'm still keeping a good pace and the effort level feels right. The selection of real food (as opposed to gels and candy, which I generally avoid in ultras) is fairly limited. Fortunately, I have brought some of my own to augment and I'm being pretty careful about keeping my eating and drinking caught up with my effort.
I hit 25 miles at 9:43AM (4:43 elapsed), which is just slightly slower than where I'd expect to be if a sub- 20 was the target. That's fine, I wasn't really expecting to pull that off. Plus, we are about to hit the infamous B-roads; minimum maintenance roads that only tractors and true off-road vehicles can get through. Four of us are running together and as we pass the signs warning drivers to think twice about continuing, we are pleased to find that, despite yesterday's rain, the footing is fairly good. There are obvious goopy sections that we avoid, but most of it is reasonably firm. The grade is slightly downhill and we continue at an easy jog for a hundred yards at which point we step in it...
Yes, I have an advanced degree in engineering and I get the physics of unbalanced reciprocating motion. But, being able to solve a system of differential equations does not prepare you for the visceral experience. Put an extra pound of water in your pack and you hardly notice it. Put a pound of mud on the bottom of your shoe and your stride immediately devolves into chaos. There's no good way to slow down as the treads of our trail shoes are now completely encased in mud. We stagger down the hill, pinwheeling our arms to maintain some sort of balance and manage to stay upright. Walking the rest of the road starts to seem like a really good idea, especially since we're now heading back uphill.
At the end of the section is a significant descent, but it's steep enough that a lot of rock has been added to the mix to keep the road from washing out completely. It's still just mud with rocks, not a proper gravel road, but we are able to run it gingerly. After a mile, we are back on real gravel again, but only for a few hundred yards before we're hit with another section, and this one is not even pretending to disguise the depth of the mud.
It's only a mile and a half long, but it's completely flat, which means drainage is non-existent. The only way to make any forward progress is to run on the very edge of the road, brushing up against the thick wall of vegetation lining the track. In the process, I manage to piss off some hornets, one of which stings me on the neck. While I'm loudly cursing that event, another one flies in my mouth and stings the inside of my lip. Fortunately, this section is immediately followed by the third aid station and I find that some ginger ale does a fine job of neutralizing the sting.
Leaving the aid station, I decide now is a good time for my first extended walk break. Rather than just walking the big hill out of the station, I walk a whole mile and try to listen to any complaints that might be bubbling up from the engine room. I don't have to listen very hard. My hips are not happy. That's a bit odd for me, but one never knows which body part is going to start whining first in an ultra. Far more concerning is what happens when I try to get back to running; I can't. Well, OK, I can run for a quarter mile, but then things start shutting down. I walk some more and try again. Same result. Something is going seriously wrong.
This ain't my first rodeo. I know what to do. Keep moving at whatever pace works until things come back. Unless you're legitimately injured (I'm not) they always do. I walk the next three miles and try running again. It's not much better. Ironically, the only section that really seems runnable is the short section of B-road that I had expected to walk. It isn't that muddy and the soft surface feels better at a running stride. I walk into the aid station at mile 40 wondering just what is going on. I've fallen apart this quickly due to heat stroke, but that's clearly not the problem here. The skeletal muscles are just calling it quits and the race isn't even half over.
I take a long stop, about 15 minutes, at the aid station. There's a decision to be made. I'm obviously not going to enjoy the rest of this race. However, the whole point of ultras is continuing when you'd rather quit, so that's not really an issue. My threshold for dropping out of a race is pretty simple: serious injury or the very real possibility of harm due to continuing (like, crossing a mountain pass while lightening is hitting the ground). Neither of those is true. However, there is a somewhat related concern: I have to drive home. The plan was to finish sometime between midnight and 5AM. That would give me time to get back to the hotel and get some sleep before the trip. Assuming that I'll be walking most of the way from here, we're looking at a 7AM finish on the very optimistic side and maybe as late as 9 or 10. Even with my late checkout, that means driving home on basically no sleep. I decide that if I finish the 100K loop by 7PM, I'll continue, hoping for a finish less than 12 hours later and at least a nap at the hotel. Otherwise, I'll drop down. For those not familiar with the parlance, a drop down is when two or more distances start together and you decide to switch from a longer to a shorter mid-race. It's technically not a Did Not Finish since you did finish a legit event, but it's still not what you wanted to do.
In retrospect, there was an obvious remedy to this dilemma: just stay in Des Moines another night. The bed and hot tub at the Drury Inn are every bit as nice as my own and I don't have any big plans for Labor Day. But, as is often the case when a race is going to hell, the right answer didn't even occur to me. Marginally refreshed from the rest, I run the next mile through the little town of Winterset (it would be a real shame to not run one of the few paved sections of the course). Once back on gravel, it's back to mostly walking, though I am able to run the downhills, the longest of which brings me to the water drop at the Hogback bridge.
After filling my bottles, I sit down to rest and take in the Hogback bridge. I've never seen the movie, so maybe I'm missing some really important context, but I don't understand the appeal of the Bridges of Madison County. There's none of the ornate trim common to covered bridges in New England. Nor do they have the majestic beam of the Amish covered bridges in Pennsylvania and Ohio, wide enough for a four-abreast team of horses to pass. They just look like somebody stuck a big Jenga box across a river. They don't even have a high-peaked roof to shed the snow, which is supposedly the reason you'd ever build a covered bridge in the first place. I realize I may have just pissed off a bunch of readers from Iowa, but one of the advantages of growing up in New York is that you don't worry too much about that. Plus, I already gave Iowa props for American Gothic and that endorsement loses a lot of credibility if I pretend that these bridges have any merit beyond keeping your feet dry crossing a river. At any rate, if spending a few minutes denigrating a bridge is preferable to making forward progress, you're definitely not having a good race.
The five miles from the bridge to the next aid station at Covered Bridges Winery are truly a slog. The sun is out now and this section doesn't have a lot of shade. I can still run the downhills, but nothing else and it's getting hot enough that even my walking pace is way off. The aid station only has one chair and its occupant doesn't look like he's going anywhere soon, so I just lie down in the grass in the shade of the winery sign. After a 15-minute nap, I head out again. Slowly.
There's no chance of getting back to the 100K finish by 7PM. In fact, I'm worried that I might not even get to the next aid station by dark. I have a light with me, but the last mile to the aid station is B-road and I really would prefer to be able to spot the deepest mud before I step in it.
After a few miles of walking (on one of the only extended flat sections of the course - it would have been a great time to run if my legs were around), I finally get to a downhill and start running. That transition is enough to set off a pack of four dogs who reside at the house I'm passing. Only one of them seems interested in actually biting me; the others are merely offering moral support in the form of very loud barking. Your brain is pretty good at overriding the "I'm tired" switch in survival situations, and I manage to move my leg quick enough to evade the first two attempts at my flesh. At that point, the dog recognizes that, rather than backing up, I'm stepping towards him and yelling quite loudly. As is typically the case, this is enough to get him to rethink the engagement (which is, I guess, why we breed dogs and shoot wolves). After another minute of barking and shouting, they decide it's not worth the bother, but it has spoiled my opportunity to run downhill.
At the base of the same hill, I note that I've got a fair bit of gravel in my shoe and use the rail of the bridge (not a revered Madison County Covered Bridge, just a generic concrete bridge) to take off my shoe. Even with my foot on the rail, I'm so stiff I can barely reach my shoe. It occurs to me that if I drop my shoe in the drink, I am really screwed. So, I try really hard not to do that and manage to get the shoe back on.
I get to the last B-road with the sun still well in the sky and stagger into the 58-mile aid station. It's already almost 7PM, so I don't stay long. If I'm going to stop in another 4 miles, I might as well just get it over with. The last 4 miles is fairly easy; just rolling enough that I have a fair bit of downhill to run without struggling on the uphills. I come into the finish just before 8PM.
Again, in retrospect, I really wish I had thought about simply staying in Iowa another day because it's clear the worst is behind me. This is normal for 100's: a big trough followed by a general recovery. The trough is usually much later in the race, and there's no guarantee you won't go in the tank a second time but, generally speaking, once you start to feel better, you keep feeling better.
However, that thought did not occur to me and I tell the Race Director, Brad, that I'm going to drop down to the 100K. He's disappointed, as any RD is when someone bails on a hundo, but he doesn't try to talk me out of it. I get my official finisher hat and mug for the 100K and pack up my stuff.
Between the unmarked course and the spartan aid stations, I'd put this race in the category of "lightly supported." That's not a bad thing as long as the race organization makes that clear. I felt they did, though some others caught short on aid. There seems to be an assumption that you run this one with a crew. Running it without requires a fair bit of planning. If you want the Gravel Grinder on Foot experience with full amenities, you'd probably do better to run Heartland. If you don't need as much, this race has a lot to recommend it. The B-roads are a unique experience, the course is quite pretty, and (unlike heartland, which literally has 1 tree on the entire route) the course never goes more than a couple miles with offering some shade.
So, will I go back to try to run the full 100 miles? I truly don't know. I'd like to, but only if I think I can run it reasonably well. I don't really mind moving slow on singletrack but walking roads just doesn't inspire me. This should have been a good course for me and it's not clear why it wasn't. As recently as February 2020, I was still winning these things outright. Not every time, of course, but typically in the hunt and beating all comers a few times a year. A few OK but not great runs last fall didn't bother me; I was just happy that races were happening again. This year, the wheels have come completely off. Yes, there have been some injuries and heart surgery is not a small thing, but assessing age is kind of like assessing global warming: you have to keep asking if it's just a bad year or the new normal. At any rate, the descent to mediocrity has been astonishingly steep.
Fortunately, none of this has dampened my love for running. If I'm just going to be one of those old guys who's out there forever, so be it. I just need to plan accordingly. If I still have a few good results left in me, so much the better.
Contrary to previous 100's, I wrote the song for this one before I did the race. I just felt like I had a handle on the vibe and I knew I could change it after if I wanted to. I consider re-writing the verse since "quit, I never will" is perhaps a bit hypocritical in light of the drop down. I prefer to think of it as aspirational. Maybe next time I'll sing it for another 38 miles.
And, here it is. (Note, depending on your browser settings, this may start playing immediately).
