Another “not a climbing post” post. Sorry. But this weekend was an amazing adventure and I have to get it down on paper somewhere. On Saturday I crewed for Steve at the 2008 Vermont 100. I’d never crewed an ultra-marathon before, so I didn’t know what to expect. A friend summarized CREW as “Cranky Runner, Endless Waiting” which is pretty accurate, but I’m going to extend it to CREWED: Cranky Runner, Endless Waiting, Excellent Day.
Camp 10 Bear scare
We made it to the first couple of aid stations without incident. It was a long ways to the first one for the runners, so there was no hurry for us. The second one was a short drive, taking us for the second time past a store that now, at 7:00 am, was open. We stopped and got coffee and ice for the coolers. I bet they had to stock a lot of ice to make it through that weekend.
At the first aid station we were surprised to find Steve already out front, perhaps in 20th place, and by the second he’d moved up to somewhere around 14th. His split times were close to what he’d been hoping and he was taking in a lot of calories. All was looking good.
We packed up leisurely at Stage Road and got in the cars to head to the next aid station. I checked where he was against our list of split times to gauge how long we had. It was only 40 minutes. This was a short one. Then I checked the directions to the next station. They said the minimum driving time was 40 minutes. The driving times were proving to be overly cautious, but still. We were going to have to boogey if we weren’t going to miss him.
While Robert drove, I crawled into the back of the car and frantically tried to figure out how to break through to the trunk. Once in the trunk I started mixing drinks and replenishing the “go bag” as Robert careened around corners. We went past a handler marker that seemed to be pointing the opposite way from what the printed directions were saying, so we split our party into two with one car following each possible line. In a cloud of dust, Robert and I arrived at the aid station first. I took off running, a small cooler in my arms and the “go bag” over my shoulder, dropping things as I ran. Arriving breathless at the aid station I found myself curiously alone.
“Did the runners come through yet?” I panted. No. And they weren’t expected any time soon either. Pawing through the paperwork, I realized we’d missed an aid station. We were at Camp 10 Bear, which was the next station on the driving directions, but the split time I’d been going by was from something called Route 12. Slowly I came to accept the fact that Route 12 had been a station with handler access two years ago when Steve last ran VT 100, but that it was now a non-handler aid station. We all took a deep breath and realized we’d raced like madmen to get to an aid station we’d be spending the next three hours at. Later, Steve complained that we’d missed an aid station. I’m not sure he believes me either.
This was our longest, most casual break of the day. We ate lunch and had a chance for some rest and recreation. I did a crossword puzzle and took a walk. Tara had a nap. We had a nice spot in the shade but it wasn’t on Steve’s path, so eventually we gave it up and moved to a more convenient place in the sun. It was midday and getting brutally hot. When Steve came in, he looked and felt like death. It was his first weigh-in and when one of the medical team walked him over to us, we expected the worst. Indeed, Steve had almost dropped enough weight to be yanked for observation, but the medical staff was more worried about the freckles on his back. They wanted us to put more sunscreen on him, which his mother made absolutely certain of.
Steve was miserable. He’d been vomiting and he felt like he was running badly. We tried to tell him he was 12th but he didn’t seem to believe us. He talked about quitting and hoped his other daughter Jamie would catch up with us in time to see him run. As he left Camp 10 Bear for the first time, I wondered if we’d be back there a second time.
It seems like the scale must have been off because when he did make it back to Camp 10 Bear and weighed in again he’d mysteriously re-gained all the weight he’d supposedly lost. Or he might have been wearing five pounds of wet clothing since it’d been pouring for the last 20 minutes. Either way. As he stood over the scale, I heard the medic say “One hundred thirty . . . ” before moving in for a closer look. It didn’t matter. One hundred and thirty anything was enough to keep him above the five percent weight loss limit. “Five,” the medic finished. When Steve said, “Thank God,” I knew his heart was still in the race. He didn’t want to be yanked. And now that Kevin was joining him as a pacer, the dark days of Camp 10 Bear were behind us.
Making friends and moving up
For a long time Steve was stuck in 11th or 12th place. I knew he’d be bummed to not finish in the top 10, but everyone in front of him looked strong and he wasn’t catching up. Although a few people came and went without our getting to know them, there was a group of runners ranging from 5th to 12th who became familiar to us through their crews.
There was Ryan Thomas whose crew were a couple of young men wearing homemade “Team Thomas” tank tops. Ryan came into every aid station with a smile and was actually able to eat a pizza at the first Camp 10 Bear aid station. The last I saw him he was balancing on one foot while changing shoes at Margaritaville. Brian was another fixture who later drifted out of sight. Coming into Tracer Brook, Steve told me, “That guy’s keeping me in the race.” Devon was the lead woman runner, so she really stood out. Her handler Linda was absorbed into our large, loud group as the race went on and our runners got closer. Those were the teams we knew well whose runners Steve eventually beat.
Steve running with Brian
On the other hand were the runners who pulled away. Matt, who drank nothing but Coke and whose handlers were wearing “Mom & Meerkat” t-shirts, made an impressive run at the end to somehow come in 4th. He must have really been moving while everyone else was dragging to have pulled that off. Then there was “that guy’s son” who turned out to be an ultra-running legend named Joe Kulak. Actually, we knew his name was Joe Kulak. We just didn’t know he was a legend. Joe’s father was a friendly, steady presence for a long time.
Our runner was known as “your Dad.” Steve’s relationship to our vast group was varied. He was someone’s brother, someone’s boyfriend, and someone’s best friend. He had parents and children and cousins there. But his biggest cheerleader was his daughter Tara whose whoops of “Go Dad!” were so enthusiastically pervasive that people would call Steve “your Dad” to his own mother.
Crewing would be a lot less fun without that shared camaraderie with other crews. We all cheered for each other’s runners. To survive a hundred mile race is a victory in itself, and to that end the runners were competing against the course and the conditions, not each other. But as you get down to the wire, when the chance of placing is there, you start to care. And in the midst of your celebration you realize your joy is another crew’s sorrow. We wanted Devon and Ryan and Brian and Matt and Joe to do well. Just maybe a little less well than Steve.
The watermelon fairy only comes to boys and girls who don’t complain about their watermelon
Steve’s nemesis for these long races is his stomach. His legs’ll keep going forever but his stomach wants to quit. When he ran the VT 100 two years ago, his salvation was oranges. Unfortunately, there’s nothing magic about oranges and despite a steady stream of them, his stomach started acting up again. So then we changed to grapes. Grapes got him through a few aid stations but pretty soon he was retching again and grapes elicited the same pained “no” that everything else did.
Up until that point we’d been feeding him from our own supplies, but he’d no longer eat anything we had with us. So we started foraging at the aid stations. Steve’s mother hit on the idea of watermelon, and indeed it was a hit. Until we got to West Wind and they didn’t have watermelon.
Shoes and watermelon at Margaritaville
“You don’t understand,” I told the volunteers there. “Our runner hasn’t eaten anything but watermelon for 30 miles.” Regardless, they didn’t have any watermelon. Then one of Brian’s crew said he thought they had some watermelon. He walked a few minutes back to his car and brought us their last chunks of watermelon, a truly generous act.
At the next aid station, Bill’s, they didn’t have watermelon either. Once again we were milling about trying to figure out what to do when the watermelon fairy appeared, this time in the form of Steve’s cousins who were bringing dinner for the crew. They’d brought sandwiches and –huzzah!– a fruit salad. The fruit salad was separated into piles of watermelon, honeydew melon, and cantaloupe (in descending order of how likely he was to eat it) and placed off limits.
After Steve got weighed in, we handed him the cup of scavenged watermelon chunks. “Why are you cutting it up?” he asked mournfully, as though we spent our downtime thinking up ways to torture him. Like that time we put sunscreen on him. Or when we offered him a dry shirt. “It’s the only way we can get it,” we told him, not having the heart to add that unless the watermelon fairy showed up again he was going to be out of luck at the next aid station.
Torturing Steve in dastardly ways
The next aid station was also the last and it also didn’t have watermelon. We know because we asked. By which I mean that I asked and his mother asked and his cousin asked. We asked the people manning the aid station and the official truck that stopped by and anyone within earshot. But no watermelon fairy came.
Taking stock of our options and noting that he only had another four and a half miles to run, I decreed that we’d offer him Green Magma. But we never even got the chance. Not seeing watermelon in our hands, he walked straight to the aid station and innocently asked them, “Do you have any watermelon?” I don’t know how they stopped themselves from laughing. Or hitting him with whatever was handy. But they simply said no, and Steve wandered away again without eating a thing.
Out of our dreams and into our arms
Steve, Devon, Barry* and their respective pacers had been running in 7th, 8th, and 9th place for a couple of aid stations. At the second to last aid station, Steve left in 8th. At the last station, Brian’s mother told us that while driving over she’d seen Steve pushing hard to get past Barry, that she thought Steve was going to take him.
By then it was dark and a fog was rolling in. It was a medium-long wait at Polly’s and the runners were taking longer than expected. Polly’s was also an aid station for the horses who were having their own 100 mile race. Their handlers all drove monster pick-up trucks that would loom out of the darkness stirring up dust into the already thick air and blocking our view down the long, dark road. Finally we started seeing lights coming. But time after time it was horses who materialized beneath the lights, not runners. Based on Brian’s mother’s testimony, we were hoping to see Steve first, but when the first non-equine appeared, it was Barry. And the next one was Devon.
Steve wasn’t far behind Devon but he seemed despondent and only semi-coherent. “He only said one thing,” Tara reported when she came back from jogging the first hundred feet with them. “He said: ‘Just tell me how much farther I have to go? How much farther?'” You can’t hear Tara’s eerily accurate mimicry of the tone of voice Steve had been exclusively using for the last fifty miles, but imagine something like “How long, O Lord, how long?”
Barry didn’t linger long at this aid station–he was out before Steve was in. With only four and a half miles to go before the finish, and believing that Steve had made his move but hadn’t been able to sustain it, we resigned ourselves to 9th place. 9th place was fine. 9th place was great even. But for a moment there . . .
The fog at the finish line was even deeper than it had been at Polly’s. Only one horse crossed while we were waiting and it appeared so suddenly out of the mist that it almost bowled someone over. The same three crews were assembled again and it had all been said and done. No plans to make this time: no strategy to review, no gear to assemble, no bottles to refill. Nothing to do but wait.
A foggy finish line
I was pacing and rambling, checking my watch every 30 seconds, hoping, as we all were, that they’d be faster than expected but knowing, as we all did, that they’d be slower. At 10:27 I said that, realistically, this was the earliest we could have expected them, though we’d been straining to see through the fog for 15 minutes already. Within minutes we heard a yell and saw lights. One of the volunteers called out and a muffled answer came back. Barry.**
Of course Barry was who we expected. We all applauded, or tried to. Then, in one of the most heart-stoppingly exciting moments of my life, the twin beams of light resolved themselves into Steve and Kevin only yards from the finish line. Polite applause became screeching pandemonium. In an instant I stopped being Steve’s crew chief and became his girlfriend. I made a beeline for him, nearly knocking him over as I screamed “You did it! You did it!” repeatedly into his ear. He probably thought I meant “You ran 100 miles” but what I really meant was, “You passed Devon and Barry.”
I’ll never know where they found that last burst of energy or why it should matter so much whether he was 7th or 9th when only two minutes (over a period of eighteen and a half hours) separated them. I only know it was an unbelievably proud and satisfying moment. For all of us.
Most of the crew at Bill’s
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* Barry’s name turned out to be Perry but Barry was what we called him all day so it’s how I’ll always think of him.
** What actually happened was that Kevin answered “Pretty Boy” (Steve’s nickname) but all we heard was the y sound at the end.
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Steve’s race report
Crew tips for ultra-marathons
Bring chairs and stuff to do. There’s a lot of hurry up and wait.
Parking lots aren’t always right next to aid stations. You’ll want a “go bag” or small cooler or both that can be easily toted. I saw one person with a luggage cart, which is genius.
If you have some way to get split times for the race from someone who ran it in approximately the time your runner is planning on, it’ll be hugely helpful. You can’t predict how long a leg will take based on the mileage. It depends on how steep and technical the terrain is and how long into the race it is.
Plan ahead for food for the crew (don’t expect fast food drive thru’s along your route). Go to the bathroom and eat and drink when you have a chance. Put sunscreen on yourself. You’re important too.
You’re not a pit crew but speed matters. Steve passed several runners at aid stations by coming in behind them and leaving before them. Sometimes a person who’s had a longer break can make it up, but sometimes they can’t. Be efficient.
Talk to your runner ahead of time and make sure you know: what is to be swapped at every station (e.g. water bottle filled with sport drink, salt pills); what is to be easily available at every station (e.g. sunscreen, hat); and what special items might be needed at which specific aid stations (e.g. change of shoes at Margaritaville, headlamp at Bill’s).
Don’t forget the pacer. Poor pacers get no respect despite running farther than most of us ever have. Talk to them ahead of time too and make sure you not only know what they’ll need but who’s supposed to be providing it. Our pacer had brought his own sports drink but hadn’t brought any water bottles and we had some fast re-arranging to do.
Crewing is slow and has its boring moments (interspersed with frantic activity). Having friends helps. Making friends works too. Everyone there is in the same boat you are, so reach out. In retrospect, we should have gotten to know Barry’s crew better. It might have made us less attached to the order they finished in and at least we’d have learned that his name was really Perry.