Team Atehena – TransRockies Run 2008

Stage 5: Red Cliff to Vail
Distance: 23 miles, 2685 feet
Climbing: 4407 feet

I’ve run out of time here, so will have to update ASAP. The short version is that we’ve made it to Vail and we’re mostly intact. The stage had its ups-and-downs (literally, of course, as well as figuratively), but it has to be mentioned that the high country mid-stage offered the most beautiful vistas we have seen. We were solid today, but a slow descent into the village of Vail, through much of the resort area’s ski terrain (MUST come back in the winter) – your reporter again the reason for the slower pace – left us a little longer on the trail than would have otherwise been the case. Still, we came in at under five-and-a-half hours, so we’re still beating predictions. As ever, we’re only “racing” ourselves, so we’re super-happy with this result.

Update

As I write from my airport hotel room in Denver, far from long miles, high altitude and heat, I am in a position to fill in some gaps intentionally left void earlier in this story, gaps that provide fuller context to why I was apprehensive about stage 5 as well as why it was a bit of a slow road to the finish on that day. [Note: this update has actually been written in one hotel room, two airports and one airplane – it appears I’ve become even more long-winded with this time spent in thin air.]

As you will recall from our stage 3 report, things didn’t go exactly to plan on that longest stage of the TRR08. I mentioned that the cause of our slow finish was a bit of overzealous-by-RC tempo setting during the middle portions of the stage. True, but only part of the story.

At around three-and-a-half hours into the stage, I started feeling pretty rough. By four hours, I told Aviva I was in a “dark patch” and that I wouldn’t be doing a ton of talking for a while. It was frustrating as we were rolling downhill along the Colorado Trail and I really wanted to be able to enjoy this 10k section of single track. But I just wasn’t feeling myself – I really had to focus to keep myself moving and, equally important, moving in a straight line. Through the third and last aid station of the day, 4 miles from the finish, I didn’t let on but I was having a hard time hanging onto Aviva through the winding single track. Another mile later and we spit out onto the flat valley property of Camp Hale, a long, hot, exposed 3 miles to the finish. For the first time in the race, we – at my request – walked the first half-mile section of this home stretch. I just didn’t have it in me to run. I needed fuel. Though I had to fight the gag reflex at this point, I took down one last gel and readied myself for the limp home. It was at this point that the mixed team we had passed went ambling by. Though they were by no means flying, I could only watch as they disappeared up the road – the best I could put out was around 12-minute-miles.

My breathing became ragged. I started sounding like a locomotive. I swore under my breath at how bad I felt, how weak. I wheezed encouragement to myself, spitting out self-talk in rhythm with my painfully sluggish stride: “Come-On-Car-ter-Come-On-Car-ter…” Aviva began to look at me oddly, wondering who the runner next to her had become. We continued this way for the next 2 miles, me with my head hung down, eyes angled up at the team up ahead, trying not to lose contact, trying to hang onto my pride as my supposedly inexperience wife at my side looked the far better of the two of us at the end of this long day.

The road turned up slightly before the final stretch into the finish. I asked that we walk. My head hung lower. At the top, it was Aviva who suggested we run again, completing the reversal of roles. I fixed my eyes on the finish line a half kilometer away and just kept going until the end. That was all there was.

It was only once we had stopped, once I was able to direct my focus away from something other than the three feet of dirt in front of me, that I was able to take stock. Something wasn’t right. Sure, I was tired, but tired I know – this was worse. I couldn’t face the thought of food; fluids, too, were out of the question. All I wanted to do was sit down. I found a lounger by the Salomon tent and collapsed. While Aviva replenished, I just stared into space. Minutes past, but I was still panting, unable to compose myself. I looked at my heart rate monitor. 129 after 10′ of rest. Nowhere near as high as it used to be during my pre-surgery bouts of supra-ventricular tachycardia (SVT), but still higher than it should be. It climbed as I rose to wander down to the creek to soak my legs. Wander became a bit of a stagger and I was nearly hyperventilating as I walked the couple of hundred metres. In the water, my chin fell to my chest and I simply stood like a statue, trying to breathe regularly, while those around me collectively downloaded their stages. I was tired and upset, but mostly I was angry at the fact my heart was “letting me down” as I thought of it with my post-race stupidity.

I was able at this point to figure out why I had felt so weak for the latter miles of the stage. Pre-surgery, my heart condition typically manifested as SVT (extra-high heart rates) followed by PAS (paroxismal atrial fibrillation – irregular, though not necessarily high, heart rates). My cardiologist had originally posited that it may be that the SVT was triggering the PAS and that by correcting the SVT with the radio frequency ablation procedure, the PAS would no longer be a problem. However, based on the way I presented on his surgical table, Dr. Leather considered that I may have two separate pathologies, the latter triggering the PAS on its own. He suggested I may need to return for a follow-up procedure. In the interim, though, I have been much less active and, though I have had the occasional bout of identifiable PAS, I didn’t worry too much about it. The trouble comes with the identification of PAS. Whereas it’s simple to know when you’re in SVT – your heart pounds out of your chest, the numbers on your heart rate monitor leave no doubt and, often, you’re soon feeling fairly faint – PAS is more subtle. And so it is that I didn’t know what exactly was going on during stage 3 until I stopped. Yes, I had had a couple of small episodes during my limited training back home, but the mind has an amazing capacity to shield us from injury, to do what it needs to to keep the body going. Or perhaps I’m just dumb. In any event, I felt like hell at the end of this Queen stage and needed to go for my heart meds. It took a couple of hours for me to get back to sinus rhythm; once there I breathed a sigh of relief and took stock.

I knew I wanted to continue the race, Aviva’s dream race that had become my shared passion. I also knew I had to take better care of myself. And so it was that we decided to take stage 4 as a rest day. I wanted to give my heart a break after its unexpected workout the day before. Aviva supported this approach and so we hiked and ran well within ourselves on stage 4. Yes, we were pleased when we finished with a relatively great result, but we were even happier that everything in my chest stayed right. We breathed a collective sigh of relief and looked ahead to stage 5, though – and now you know why – with a little extra trepidation knowing this one was going to be another long, hot stage of over 5 hours on our feet.

Red Cliff is an amazing little town. I don’t know the complete history, but I gather it was originally one of the many small mining towns scattered around the Colorado high country, this one with a largely Latino population. Mining no longer drives the community, but that community is still Latino-flavoured (is it wrong to add a “u” to “flavour” when you’re a Canadian writing about a Latino community in America?), though with an increasingly hippy/artsy populace moving in. It sounds as though both should hurry up and dig in, as a private ski resort is on the way along with all that resort community status entrains. Whoever lives there, present or future, Red Cliff will always reside in remarkable surrounding, situated as it is nestled in the narrow, steep-walled valley that gives it its name.

One consequence of those protective cliffs is an early sunset and late sunrise, leading to corresponding cold overnight mountain temperatures. So it was that we woke up Friday morning to frost on the ground and frozen clothes “drying” on the line. We packed with the speed of frigid fingers and headed to breakfast sporting an extra layer.

It was an extra layer that was quickly shed, as with the sound of the starter’s pistol (an actual 9mm Ruger (sp?) in this case…some parts of this west are still wild) we headed up an east-west valley into the sun and towards Vail Pass. It was hot in no time so, mindful of the long day and wanting to keep my health in order, we kept an easy pace as we ran/hiked the lower portions of the nearly 4000′ climb that started our day. Further constraining the pace was the fact Aviva was feeling nauseous on this morning. Though it would do nothing to aid her stomach malaise, I took her Gregory hydration pack in the hopes that at least her step would be lightened her step if not the brick in her gut. Between conservatism and gastro-distress, our pace had us back in the “pack” during the early uphill portions of the stage. However, the short history of this race had proven that our tortoise strategy typically found us regaining many of the teams that left us behind in the opening couple of hours of each stage. True to form, by the time we reached the second checkpoint, about a thousand feet short of the day’s first summit, we had latched back onto one of our favourite teams, the Meeth couple from Aubourn.

We took our typical CP strategy, me running ahead with Aviva’s pack to refill fluids for both of us while Vives caught back on then passed the CP to get a head start while I grabbed gels, etc. This approach typically saved us a minute or two but also, more importantly to Aviva, allowed her to keep rolling and not lose momentum. It also meant that I usually had a couple of minutes of harder running following the CP, invariably illuminating for me that I wasn’t in shape to be covering ground much (if any) faster than Aviva and I were as a team. The lesson was the same as I ran out of stage 5’s CP2, if not more pronounced.

Running uphill with the two full hydration packs, I felt like I had bricks for shoes, huffing and puffing and forced to walk a couple of the short climbs. Without adequate justification I was immediately grumpy at my fatigue, projecting onto my teammate ahead of me. As soon as I caught up to Aviva I told her that she needed to take her pack back – I no longer had it in me to do double duty. Fortunately, Vives’ stomach was feeling better and we soon fell back into our team rhythm, me happy to let Aviva set tempo while I enjoyed the lesser weight on my back.

We held our pace as we ascended the last few hundred wooded vertical feet towards through top of the climb, breaking into subalpine meadows and catching our breath once again at the ragged skyline that materialized in all directions. A short descent to regroup and lament aching quadriceps and we were climbing again, this time headed for high ground within the Vail ski area. The climb took us through Vail’s back bowls, terrain that would have had us salivating at the prospect of tele-turns if it weren’t for the treeless exposure leaving us parched. We dug in and ascended the switchbacks across the fall-line, heading towards the final checkpoint of the day. Once there, we again followed our CP technique while Aviva got a head-start on the descent.

Perhaps it was the chase to catch up that put me in the cardiac red zone. Whether that or some combination of the days’ duration, heat, electrolyte imbalance, etc., about 10 minutes into the 8 mile descent I had to honour our pact and tell Aviva that my heart was going sideways. It slid quickly in that direction and I was soon spoiling the mountain still with my wheezing and ever-more-heavily plodding footfalls. This time I recognized what was happening and almost immediately went for my medication. I perhaps should have gone one further and walked or stopped, but I refused to do either, over Aviva’s protestations. In lame defence of my stupidity, stopping was unacceptable to me even if we weren’t technically racing, and walking was actually harder than running. Though by this time I was coming down the mountain like a drunken sailor, weaving back-and-forth across the trail and tripping every dozen or so strides as though I had drop foot, at least at a run the forward vector gave me something approaching gyroscopic stability. During the spells that I was so out of breath I had to walk, I had a hard time holding myself upright.

Through CP3, halfway down the mountain, I continued my refusal to stop, noticing that my meds appeared to be having a positive effect. Aviva wasn’t so sure; it was clear she was angry with me (and reasonably so), though in the face of my pig-headedness the best she could do was tell me she was slowing down, threatening a time penalty if I did not also and we consequently reached the finish line separated by more than the allowed 2-minutes. At this she didn’t get much argument from me, especially when the trees began to break and it became clear we still had many minutes of descending left before we reached Vail.

To say I reached my low point here, still a couple of miles above the finish line would be the understatement of this little story. I’m not proud of the vocabulary that came out of my mouth the next few minutes, or of the many times I was forced to catch myself before falling or how often I had to walk. But I did what I had to do to get to the finish, for better or worse. And, thankfully, in the better column came the fact that with a few hundred metres to go I found my breathing coming back to me and my head clearing. My heart was falling back into a regular sinus rhythm just as we reached the end of this very long day. In many ways it was my happiest finish line yet in this event.

(Thank you once again for all the wonderful comments – they were such a pleasure to return to in WiredLand.)