The Planner's Plan Was an Also Ran : My 2022 American River 50M Race Report

 I want all the proteins: Sriracha chicken chunks, garlicy roast pork loin, sweet and crunchy coconut shrimp, and a 14oz bloody ribeye weeping fat. Even tofu, if I must.  Bodies are pretty incredible machines.  I mean, at the end of it, we are all just visceral, boney, (questionably) sapient meat sacks, right?  Still, our physical selves are remarkable.  They know what they want.  And this body wants two breakfasts this morning, the day after the race.  So that’s what it gets. The only place open at 5am was McDonalds so, pride be damned, I had my breakfast starter of an Egg McMuffin, hashbrowns, and coffee.  Perfect. I’ll nurse my coffee and soon enough the Black Bear Diner across the street will be open for the main event.  Well, that turned out to be a grand breakfast consisting of 3 eggs over medium, two thick pieces of buttery rye toast, an ample bump of crispy red potato home fries, and half a fried spicy hot link kielbasa. My blood said, tersely, “this cholesterol is uncalled for!” I told my blood to STFU.

Funny, but immediately after the race , though I was in major calorie deprivation, I didn’t have an appetite.  And the idea of alcohol was stomach-turning.  I did have a post-race Lagunitas IPA out of a sense of Duty because beer after an ultra is something that is simply done. It must be done lest you are consigned to the Hellfire. It wasn’t a smooth quaff, however. I had to force it.  That told me my body was in extremis.  Within an hour though, my appetite started to come back and I had severe and urgent cravings for red meat and fresh salad greens (loaded with bleu fromage dressing and croutons, if you might).  So, I drove up to the closest steak place I could find close to the hotel.  It was a Sizzler, which is pretty much the K-Mart of blue-collar steak and buffet joints. But I didn’t care.  I gorged on salad and steak, went back to my room, got into bed, and slept the sleep of Anubis for 8 hours, awakened thrice by rude and excruciating calf cramps.  Those were 30 seconds of agony each, but I managed to fall back to sleep immediately after they resolved. 

This race was much more of a gut check than I expected.  It was a paradigm case of how well-intentioned and crisply formulated plans disintegrate into fairy dust when they meet the moment.  More on that to follow.

The trip began with a quick overnight with my girlfriend, Pam, in Concord, NH.  She was working late doing law school professor stuff (I don’t believe, however, she’s as intense as Paper Chase’s Professor Kingsfield) and hadn’t eaten so I made her spicy penne al olio when I got down there.   She had a board meeting, ate, we chatted about things, worked on the puzzle, and it was soon to bed for me since I had a 2am wake up to catch a 3:15 bus to Logan for my flight.  Of course, pre-trip/pre-race adrenaline hobbled my slumber, but I got a few REMs and rose on time for espresso and continued the travel day, every minute of which gave me agita- fearing delays, drunken raging passengers I might need to subdue, and myriad other potential aggravations.  This trip worked out okay though and I got to Sacramento on sked. No delays.  No desire to self-defenestrate.   

Oh, and one random thing which has been on my mind, before I get into the actual race stuff.  And that is this:  I think there is a loose and ironic connection between the rise of Populist Authoritarianism over the past decade, and Wordle. 

Let me explain.  Wordle is a word game - you can look it up - which is essentially an exercise in deductive logic.  You have 6 chances to move from one random guess of a 5-letter word to determining what the correct word of the day is. For those of you who remember the leisure suits and games of the '70s, it is a less mathematical (and easier) version of  Mastermind.  It has become a global phenomenon and there is a reason. The reason is that this game reminds players of what human rationality can look like. It exercises skills in deduction, not the squishier forms of inductive or abductive logic, at least not entirely. Humans like the clarity of right answers if they can get there. They seek it.

(Side note-10th grade Geometry class is the singular experience that inclined me to study Philosophy as an undergrad and be attracted by logical forms, big T truth, and also why I think critical thinking ought to be broken out as a specific discipline and taught with intention at the primary and secondary school levels in this country).

But apart from mathematicians, physicists, and logicians, most normal people’s lives are not guided by the certitudes of deductive logic. Life, rather, is bounded by loose probabilities, nuance, squishy contingencies, and the liminal Bayesian space between True and False.  Life is complicated on all of the levels and while we search for clarity and certainty in the day to day, we generally fail.  Wordle reminds us that Truth derived from basic principles is possible. So we are attracted. 

However, the world is not filled with first principles.  It is filled with noxious ideology and absurdity, courtesy of the news cycle and both sides of the political spectrum consistently lying prostrate to the confirmation bias which at once binds and limits them. The nut kicks which ensue between combatants results in nothing more than white noise which frustrates and annoys the more modulated minority among us.

Unassailably logical certainty in the real world is nearly impossible to find. Enter the populists. They don’t pretend to be democratic or even value time-tested norms of political behaviour.  They don’t pretend to account for the varied and complex positions of their countries, counties, or name the constituency.  They preach a message of solutions, direction, vision, and a definable, ostensibly positive end state of their own creation.  Now, that end state and the verbal flourishes which color it can be composed of falsehoods, “fake news,” fictionalized folderal, and flawed fantasy, but spoken with certainty by a strong and articulate personality, however wrongheaded, mean-spirited, and disingenuous, the human lemming will respond and align.  Combine this propensity of the only pseudo sapient with the sheer volume of bullshit being vomited out into the world, and you have a population which is craving direction, a bright-lined vector leading to a compelling and well-sold vision of how life should be, however superficially scaffolded with untruths.  The destination doesn’t really matter. Epistemological integrity is meaningless.  What matters is the resonance of the message and its role as a  laser beam of clarity cutting through the marshmallow and cotton puffery of a confused and confusing information space.  Steve Bannon was onto something when he advocated to “flood the zone with shit.”  Shit is the populist’s friend.  It is easy to sell a simple vision in an environment of profound confusion and tension. The simple clarity of Wordle is not unlike the simple clarity of the populist’s message.  

So, one path to the answer is paved with rational analysis; the other is informed by a writhing orgy of rhetorical ecstasy. And therein lies the tragic irony of the whole business.  

So that.  Now to the race.

I arrived in Auburn, CA on a Thursday afternoon after a long but uneventful travel day. Well, that’s a lie.  Pam, being terrific and thoughtful, got me a foot hammock for the trip.  This is a rig that you hang on the seatback tray in front of you on the plane and you can put your feet in there to relax and sway.  Fantastic. A real game changer, like the neck gasket pillow. Good kit.  Thank you, Milady.

I checked into the Golden Key Best Western after the trip from Sac airport, dropped off my baggage, and walked over to Flames where I had a 24 oz local IPA and a half dozen spicy wings.  Afterwards, I headed next door to a local taqueria and enjoyed a smoky, rich, and toothsome carnitas chimichanga the size of a dachshund, and a tortilla buffet (yeah-a buffet with, like, 6 different salsa options, and queso).  So damned good, and bringing into stark relief the absolute dearth of good Mexican food in Vermont - in fact, I know of no decent Mexican place in the state.  So, that put my body into a coma at around 5pm and I fell into bed to sleep.  Part of my strategy in this race was to stay on Vermont time so that when I had to wake up at 3am to catch the shuttle to the start in Folsom on Saturday morning, it would still be 6am to my body.  That seemed to work decently.

I woke up on Friday morning, early, and stayed in bed until around 4:30.  I rose, puttered about, and walked down to the local Starbucks for coffee.  The cheery barista, a bright-eyed Latina named Elena with sass and those long, painted fingernails that make you wonder how they can get through the day without injuring themselves or others, greeted me with a mile wide smile. She pressed a decent Americano (never hot enough at Starbucks), and I sat in the comfy leather chair to think about tomorrow, race day. So much of this game is getting into the right headspace; the mental piece is key. In races over 50K I need to convince myself that I am indestructible, momentum incarnate. A Juggernaut.

That done, it was back to my room to plan the day.  First things first.  I wanted to do a nice shakeout trail run and decided upon the Robie Point Firebreak Trail.  Robie Point, as those Western States Endurance Run aficionados know, features in the last miles of that epic granddaddy of them all race. I did a little under 6 miles in and around Robie and loved it. Being California, I played lots of Eagles, and for some reason the song, Take It to the Limit, resonated that day on the run. 

"You know I've always been a dreamer (spent my life running round). And it's so hard to change."  

I’d heard so many stories about the difference between West Coast and East Coast single track and now I’d experienced it.  West Coast trails are indeed “buttery,” compared to the bony, stony, muddy, mossy East Coast's but still challenging because the red dirt changes its complexion regularly.  It can be as smooth as Barry White’s game one day and then, after a good rain, can become channelized, hazardous, and tough to get a good stride going.  This would feature tomorrow during the race.  I finished the run and, after eating a hearty breakfast of sausage, eggs, and rye at Edelweiss in downtown Old Auburn (cooked by a grizzled, tatted, and incomprehensibly adept spatula man), I headed over to Placer High School to run a lap, honoring my friend Dylan, in Montpelier, who had to drop from a furnace-like Western last year due to dehydration. Western ends with an iconic lap around the Placer High track before crossing the finish line, so that just had to be done. Such a cool quarter mile.

I showered, did some local navigation to Overlook Park, which is the finish line and the place where the 4:30 bus would leave the next morning to take us to the start in Folsom. Then from there I headed down to Folsom to pick up my race packet and schwag at Fleet Feet.  That went well. I roamed around the area on foot afterwards and ended up buying a bottle of Elijah Craig Small Batch bourbon at a local concern. Better to make decent Old Fashioneds, or so I’m told. Back in Auburn, I had a local IPA at Club Car and then walked over to a Mongolian BBQ place where I loaded up on spicy lamb, spinach, and several tons of wheat udon. Afterwards, back at home base, I took a ritual shot of pre-race Patron anejo and went to bed.  Then I woke up.  It was race day.  

Dark and chilly, I opted to wear a fleece, my buff in cap form, and light gloves for the trip down to Folsom.  I drove to Overlook Park, stowed the car, and hopped on the bus.  The inside was dense with that special pre-race anxiety and nervous energy.  Pretty typical. I ate a cinnamon roll, keeping to myself and gathering my thoughts.  I had slept some, but not much, and not deeply.  I closed my eyes for a few minutes and then we were at the start. We arrived about 45 mins before the gun went off so there was a lot of stretching and undulating and hopping about by the competitors.  I saw Tim Tollefson, who would go on to win it, toeing the line up front and chatting with friends and competitors.  Seemed like a great guy.  Friendly, supportive, but also ready to run. His finish time with an average mile pace of 7 something was beyond my comprehension. There were the standard announcements and gratitudes uttered, the clock clicked to 10 seconds remaining, we counted it down together in the lamp-lit darkness and off we went.

I had done some, not enough, research on this race, and I had goals.  Turns out that my goals were laughably naïve, but that is part of the fun.  Encounter challenges, acknowledge them, own them, persevere through them, and prevail.  In my analysis, the race would be divided into 4 basic parts (my labels):

Miles 1-7, Happy Happy Joy Joy, were to be a warmup loop on some flats and single track.  I’d take it slowly, and just get used to the terrain, and my body.  I’d assess how I was feeling, identify any trouble spots to attend to later, and just enjoy the jog.

Miles 8-31, Keep It Slow, Dumbass, were going to be mostly flat hardball surfaces with several miles of trail thrown in.  I’d need to be very careful here because I’d want to go fast.  Easy to burn out and ruin the end game. I had to modulate.

Miles 32-47, We Love It When It Sucks, would be technical single track. Not my strong suit.  I’d see how I felt. I’m not fast on trail in any case, regardless of how buttery it is, so I knew my pace would be slowish. Hopefully not too slow.

Miles 48-50, Popsicle Gruntfest, would be the notoriously steep hill of around 1000’ over three miles to the Finish.  I’d give whatever I had left to reach the end, get the medal, do the thing, and have a beer.

I wanted to run a sub-9 for this race.  My thinking was that if I could put a nice reasonable 5:15 50K together, that would give me 3:45 to cover the last 19 miles.  That’s an 11:50 pace over those 19. Seemed doable given what I thought I knew about the course, and how I saw my fitness. I even had the ridiculous thought that on the outside I could break 8:30. I know.  Hilarious.

That initial 7 mile loop was almost exactly as expected and I just relaxed into it.  The first couple of miles were slow due to darkness and the occasional conga lines ascending the trail.  Some guy took a hard and inelegant spill within the first mile and tore himself up, he laughed it off and continued, knee bloodied, number ripped off, and limping a little bit. Been there. The course was lovely with golden glowing views of the mountains and water as the sun rose slowly over the horizon. My form felt good, the trail wasn’t awful, and I was in a good flow, though I realized it was early in the day and I couldn’t get cocky.  I threw the headlamp, fleece, and gloves in the "bring back to start" box, running through the Folsom Point aid station at mi 7.1, filled up my handheld with with water and continued on, planning to hydrate well over the next leg, and intending to take my first fuel at around mile 15.2 at Willow Creek, the next aid.

My kit was simple.  Since the aid stations were spaced fairly frequently, I decided to carry my just handheld and a pocketed Nathan elastic running belt within which I had some GUs, phone, earbuds, cheaters, sports beans (by Jelly Belly!), some Clifshot gummies, salt tabs, Vitamin I, and bandages. I’d later pick up some bags of Tailwind at mile 27 from my drop.

Now I was in the relatively flat and fast part of the course and knew I would be until around mile 31.  I had to consciously slow my pace and I ended up running next to a tall wiry guy easily making his way over the course.  We chatted a bit.  He was a local from Auburn, knew the town well, tolerating my questions and giving me tips on restaurants and pubs and was familiar with the Robie Point Trail I ran yesterday.  I say, “Have you run this race before?” He sheepishly answered, “Yeah.”  “Oh, cool,” I say.  “Any tips or tricks?”  He says, “Well, you need to be fresh going into the trails at mile 31 or so. You can’t be really fresh, of course, but y’know, fresh enough.  You look on the map and that section looks like a flat nothing, but it’s not nothing.  It’s a grind. Very deceiving.” “Ah, thanks,” says I, now mildly concerned.  “Yeah, that pretty much tracks with what I’m thinking - trying to take it easy on this road section before the trails hit.  By the way, how many times have you run this?”  The guy says, “42.” This is not only the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, apparently.   I put the pieces together and said, “Holy Shit, are you Tim Twietmeyer?”  He smiled and said, “Yeah.”  I knew of Tim Twietmeyer by name because he is an ultrarunning legend, but I never knew what he looked like.  So, I was kind of embarrassed not knowing with whom I was running.  Here I am racing next to an elite in my own age group (He’s 63; I’m 60), and I didn’t even recognize him.  The guy is an institution.  Winning Western 5 times, finishing it 25 times sub 24 hrs, and running this one over 40 times - I mean, c'mon.

But I’m not generally cowed by celebrity, that time I met Tommy Makem in NYC notwithstanding.   In fact, most of them, to my mind, are assholes, full of unbridled ego and vinegar.  Not this guy. He’s an OG and possesses a classy humility born of doing and not talking.  So, we ran together for a while, just talking about things-Auburn, coaching, the power of place, local geography, taxes, running, work, etc.  I was happy and honored just to have met him.

Over the rest of this leg through Negro Bar at mile 23, to Beal’s Point at mile 27, we shifted back and forth on the course, having roughly the same pace. I was still feeling good, pretty much executing my plan.  I recall climbing up a trail section at mile 19 thinking, “OK, only a 50K to go.  Easy day.”  I chortle now just thinking about that stupid innocence. Around 23 miles or so, a bunch of us had to stop on the trail because ahead of us was a group of 5 student horseback trail riders having a lesson, and if we had tried to pass them they would have been spooked.  So, it was an opportunity to walk a bit and chat with the gaggle of 6 or 7 runners in parade.

The aid station at Beal’s Point at mile 27.4 is a milestone.  It is over halfway, the place where many racers keep drop bags, has actual bathrooms, and is a signal that you only have a few miles until you will be entering Hell, aka the Meat Grinder.  So, I recharged my water, grabbed some stuff from my drop bag, smiled, thanked the volunteers, and requested a cheeseburger.  I asked for a cheeseburger at every aid station, feigning outrage when denied. One lady said no, but that it was indeed Paradise.  I got the Buffett reference and asked for a Margarita. I, sadly, didn’t get one, but it amused the volunteers. 

The next 4.1 miles clicked off easily and I got to Granite Bay, the 50K aid station at the 5:15-5:20 mark or so. Right where I wanted to be and I felt fine.   Between Beal's and Granite, Tim warned me to hydrate well because this was a long tough section coming up.  So I drank when I got to Granite Bay, filled my bottle and off I went.  There were 6.5 miles until the next aid station at Horseshoe Bar. It was around 11:30 and it was getting hot.

“Meat Grinder.”  Sounds ominous, right?  Well, picture swimming in the open ocean and being savaged by a Great White.  Flesh is rent, bones splintered, viscera floating, soon to settle on the seabed to feed the crabs, exsanguination immediate and dark, crimson hemo-blossoms surrounding your lifeless, body-less head.  Ok?  Well, the Meat Grinder is nothing like that. That would be too direct and end things too soon.

The Grinder is a section of the course which is at its core an endless cascade of very short and steep ups and downs complicated by grooves and gouges in the dirt, rock, roots, logs tossed around like a collapsed Jenga tower, and, on that day, heat.  A more apt analogy than the shark thing, is that the MG is like being gripped tightly by a obnoxious giant with bad breath who rubs you down with course sandpaper while telling stupid jokes; then he starts gnawing on your body like a hound chewing on a piece of rawhide.  Except that this giant doesn’t have canines, he only has dull molars, and they never break the skin.  He grinds you down slowly and you soften over time.   This is the Meat Grinder.  See what I mean?

I couldn’t get a groove on with pace because of the obstructions and I ended up stopping and starting continuously. So incredibly frustrating.  And for me this, combined with the quickly rising temperatures, started to do me in around mile 33-34.  You can see it as clear as day on my Strava. I trained in the Vermont winter for this and so I think there was definitely some kind of temperature shock when I found myself running in 80F California heat with direct sunstrikes.

Twiet passed me around this time and told me to hang in there. What a mensch.  I wouldn’t see him again.  He was moving quickly and comfortably.  I wasn't. There was an inflection point somewhere in there for me and I know I lost mental fortitude and not a little grit.  I was hot, dusty, dirty, and uncomfortable but my hydration was excellent, and I didn’t feel any creeping energy fatigue from lack of fuel. I simply found myself, when I got to an obstacle, walking just a little bit longer than I had too, cursing the heat, jogging to the next challenge point and trudging through it, burning time as I went.  I knew I would finish, and then when I did some quick calculations and realized that I wouldn’t be coming in sub-9, I allowed myself to be okay with that and accept the sub-10. I left the Meat Grinder and arrived at the mile 38 aid station, Horseshoe Bar.  I drank heavily (water, though a Coors Light would have been welcome), ate some salt and vinegar chips, got a cold-water sponge douse on my back, and went on my way.  12 miles to go.

Then, at mile 39, after bulldogging my way slowly over the trail, I felt a stone in my shoe.  I stopped, sat down, removed the offending silicate, laced back up and pushed off the embankment with my left arm.  Then, the left side of my chest went into some kind of nasty spasm.  For a split second I thought I was having a heart attack and wondering who would be sad if I kicked it.  But I knew it wasn’t my heart.  This kind of thing has happened to me before.  When running these distances, our bodies have pretty much the same basic mechanical form the entire time, and it is a long time.  The legs stroke forward and aft, the core pivots, the head swivels, and the arms cycle front to back in the same plane.  They get locked into those positions over the hours so that when you change the angle of things quickly and apply force, muscles can seize.  This is what happened when I pushed off the hill 90 degrees from the lateral direction my arms had been moving all day. I gritted my teeth, groaned loudly (maybe whimpering was involved, too) and had to massage my chest and attempt to relax my arm until the pain subsided. It took maybe 9 or 10 minutes but felt like an eternity.  Then I started running again.

From there I slowed down even more.  I was out of the Meat Grinder and on better trail, but I still moved too slowly and stopped too frequently. I was fatigued and hot, but weirdly didn’t feel horrible. I think part of it was that since I realized I wouldn’t hit my time goal, it translated into “running” a more relaxed pace which, as I look at my splits, was nothing more than a very slow jog to the end.  

I passed Rattlesnake Bar without event, and got to Dowdin’s Post, only 6 miles away from the Finish. I rewatered, spent too much time joking with the volunteers, and took off.  In 3 miles I got to the foot of the final climb. I could smell the barn.  The first quarter mile was very steep, but then it eased up a bit so that the pitch reminded me of North St, back in Montpelier.  I run that road all the time so I just put myself in that gear and went to work.  About a mile and a half before the end there is an aid station named Last Gasp.  They specialize in great attitudes and fantastic popsicles.  I had three pineapple ones. Refreshed, I pushed hard to the finish, crossed the line and got my jacket and medal.  It was cool because the announcer, who I think might have been Scott Warr, one of the Trail Runner Nation hosts, gave me and Vermont a shout out when I finished.  He told me that I had come the farthest to race. I put on my slides and walked around, called Pam to check in and weepily express my appreciation for her support, and headed back to the hotel, curious how my recovery would feel.

As it turns out, my legs felt fine the next day.   In fact, after driving out to Cool to walk some trails the next day after that gargantuan breakfast at Black Bear I decided to try running again. I felt okay having done 6 miles, though I got scolded by an uppity equestrian for taking her photo without permission. I guess she thought I was perpetuating the patriarchy.  All I was doing was taking a picture of a damned horse for my girlfriend. Tuesday was my return to VT but I had a late flight out of Sac so I went for another run, a 7 miler, along the lakeshore in the morning, revisiting part of the Meat Grinder, my old friend. I wasn’t traumatized.  I had decent pop in the legs so was encouraged. The vast ocean of lupins was pretty incredible.  Prince would have loved it.

This was a good trip, a good race, and as always when running this kind of endurance event, there is plenty of time to contemplate, deliberate, cogitate, and learn, which is my default mode anyway. I wasn’t thrilled with the performance, but I’ll take it.  I placed 28/155 overall, and 2/9 in my age group having been pulverized by a legend which was, oddly, kind of fantastic. I’d like to think that the heat had an outsized effect on my performance and though it did impact my race, I think the real culprit was mental weakness.  Once I realized I wouldn’t make my expected time, I sort of said, “screw it,” and allowed myself to walk or jog much more than I would have otherwise. Lesson learned, and I need to fix that somehow. 

Another thing I learned is that I really need to get better at managing and defining expectations and predictions.  I’ve run two sub 8 hr 50M races in my short and late-in-life ultra-career:  Jack Bristol in 2019, and Montana Rail Trail in 2021.  Those were relatively “easy” races in that there was little vert, no technical trail, and took place in temperate conditions.  So why is it that I anchor my expectations for a wholly different race like AR50 on those times?  No idea. That is stupid. Yet that is what I did.  I set goals for this race based on knowing that I could run sub 8.  Ridiculous.  The right answer is to set expectations based upon the course you are actually running. I should have done more research on others’ experiences on this course.  Look at Strava and it seems like the route can be described as “run a relatively flat 47 miles and then the last 3 mile climb sucks and then you finish.”  Nope, it was far more than that. Yet another thing learned.

Now, for a burrito and an Old Fashioned.  Thanks for reading.